Category Archives: History

Still Grumbling About DST?

It was 98 years ago today that the US Congress established time-zones and approved daylight savings time, two years after Germany and Austria-Hungary organized the first implementation, which began on April 30, 1916.

A good history of daylight savings time is over on Wikipedia. Interesting facts include it was first conceived by a New Zealander, used extensively during the world wars to conserve coal during daylight hours, and didn’t become common place until the 70’s as a result of the energy crisis.

And if you’d prefer to listen to a brief history, John Oliver did an interesting segment last year on Last Week Tonight.

Nine Hundred and Fifty Years Ago Today

Westminster Abbey opens.  While this Church of England is not the oldest building, or even the oldest church, in the United Kingdom (as St. Martin’s Church in Canterbury dates back to 597), it’s one of the most known religious buildings in the United Kingdom that is the traditional place of coronation and burial for the British monarchy.

While this structure has very little to do with Supply Chains, it goes to show how long something can last when it’s built right and maintained.

Ninety Years Ago Today …

The world lost a great physicist by the name of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes. While this is not a name most people know, he was the first person to liquify helium and to discover superconductivity — both of which are critical to the modern technological age. Liquid helium, which has a temperature of 4K (4 degrees above absolute zero on the Kelvin scale, and 73 degrees below the boiling point of liquid nitrogen which can freeze a banana in as little as 3 minutes) is a key ingredient in superconducting magnets and the primary cryogenic refrigerant.

But more importantly, superconducting is used to make ultra-fast digital circuits, microwave filters for your movie phones, and, most importantly, superconducting magnets (which are the most powerful electromagnets that are required by MRI machines, mass spectrometers, and particle accelerators).

It’s a good day for a shave!


… It’s the 200th anniversary of The Barber of Seville!

And while Rossini is no Gilbert & Sullivan from a Procurement perspective, he still deserves a nod!  Because …

I am the very model of a modern Global Sourceror
I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral
I know the tools of sourcing, and I quote the facts logistical
From New Orleans to Shanghai, in order categorical

I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical
About optimization, I’m teeming with a lot o’ news
With many cheerful facts about the cost of the blue ocean routes

I Am The Very Model of a Modern Globel Sourceror!

… and I think Gilbert & Sullivan would agree (as they were influenced by Verdi who was influenced by Rossini) 🙂

Have We Reached B2B 3.0 Yet? Part 2: B2B 2.0, A History Lesson, Continued

As per Part I, over seven years ago, Sourcing Innovation published Introducing B2B 3.0 and Simplicity for All, which is available as a free download, to help educate you on the next generation of B2B and prepare you for what comes next. The expectation was that, by now, we would be awash in B2B 3.0 (Business to Business 3.0), which was simply defined as the first generation of technology that actually puts business users on the same footing as consumers, but are we?

SI would like to jump right in and answer that question, but first we have to discuss B2B 2.0 and get our terminology straight before we can discuss B2B 3.0.

B2B 2.0: The “Marketplace” era

In the early naughts, thanks in part to efforts by large B2C and C2C (Consumer-to-Consumer) players like Amazon and e-Bay who made great strides in bringing security, trust, and quality to on-line platforms, e-Commerce became a major part of the consumer world. The growth of online business in some industries was so expensive that, almost overnight, small stores and chains started suffering and going out of business. Why pay $20 for a CD that an online store would sell for $14 and ship free if you bought 4 of them?

The end result was that businesses saw the potential of the web to host large, on-line marketplaces, and address the content and community requirements, and a large number of B2B marketplaces and private networks sprang into existence. This included dozens of general purpose marketplaces, including the likes of Ariba, Enporion (now GEP), Quadrem (now Ariba), and TPN Register (acquired by GXS, now OpenText GXS which sprang onto the scene alongside dozens of vertical-specific marketplaces like Aeroxchange, ChemConnect (gone), eSourceApparel (gone), and GNX (merged with WWRE, now Global Sources). The technology was more advanced than 1.0, but it only offered basic e-Procurement features — such as catalog management, request-for-bid, simple reverse auction, and supplier directories. B2B 2.0 expanded the marketplace for e-Procurement as these marketplaces spurred a flurry of new market entrants (such as Emptoris, Ketera [now Deem], and SciQuest) and allowed mid-tier buyers and suppliers to get in the game. And even though dynamic content was limited, and search was primitive, B2B 2.0 was made out to be a good thing.

But in the end, the gains didn’t negate the losses. Even though the marketplaces and private networks initially thrived, the high access fees became even more prohibitive as suppliers had to be on multiple networks to service their buyers and buyers had to be on multiple networks if they wanted to discover new suppliers. Again, only the e-Procurement vendors won.

Lesson learned? Private Networks are redundant with the BIG Network, the ONE Network, the Internet and network redundancy (not machine redundancy in data centres) is bad, especially when everyone is on the same internet that supports the same internet protocol stack and can connect with the same open protocol.