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6 Jul 2019

History

Just a few short years before this period, the US and the USSR were friends; now, they were bitter rivals fighting a "Cold" war. As you read, reflect on how and why this happened. Write a minimum of two paragraphs for the following discussion prompt:

Why did relations between the US and the Soviet Union deteriorate after World War II?

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Keith LeannonLv2

8 Jul 2019

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What Will the Future Look Like in 2020?

Udo Gollub

In 1998, Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper worldwide.
Within just a few years, their business model disappeared and they got bankrupt.
What happened to Kodak will happen in a lot of industries in the next 10 year - and most people don't see it coming. Did you think in 1998 that 3 years later you would never take pictures on paper film again? Yet digital cameras were invented in 1975. The first ones only had 10,000 pixels, but followed Moore's law. So as with all exponential technologies, it was a disappointment for a long time, before it became way superior and got mainstream in only a few years. It will now happen with Artificial Intelligence, health, autonomous and electric cars, education, 3D printing, agriculture and jobs.

Welcome to the 4th Industrial Revolution. Welcome to the Exponential Age. Software will disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5-10 years. Uber is just a software tool, they don't own any cars, and are now the biggest taxi company in the world. Airbnb is now the biggest hotel company in the world, although they don't own any properties.

Artificial Intelligence: Computers become exponentially better in understanding the world. This year, a computer beat the best Go player in the world, 10 years earlier than expected. In the US, young lawyers already don't get jobs. Because of IBM Watson, you can get legal advice (so far, for more or less basic stuff) within seconds, with 90% accuracy compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans. So if you study law, stop immediately. There will be 90% less lawyers in the future, only specialists will remain. Watson already helps nurses diagnosing cancer, 4 time more accurate than human nurses. Facebook now has a pattern recognition software that can recognize faces better than humans. In 2030, computers will become more intelligent than humans.

Write 2 paragraphs on how your present or anticipated career or industry will or will not be affected by the developments Gollub predicts.

ead The Economist's articles, "Obama to raise trade talk concerns with Merkel."

Do you think the reduction or elimination of tariffs and notariff barriers between the U.S. and the EU through the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership will increase demand for U.S. goods and services in Europe and make european goods and services cheaper for Americans? In the face of a global recession is it wise for nations to begin raising tariffs and increasing subsidies to domestic producers? Why or why not?

Each student replies to instructorâs initial discussion question with a substantive post (minimum 250 words). Your initial post as well as a response to two other classmates initial discussion question should be done by 11:59 PM Central Standard Time (CST) - Sunday evening.

February 9, 2015 3:05 am

Obama to raise trade talk concerns with

Merke

Shawn Donnan, World Trade Editor

Â©AFP

US President Barack Obama is expected to raise concerns about the pace of

trans

Atlantic trade

talks with Angela Merkel when the German chancellor visits Washington on Monday with US

officials fretting that supposedly reinvigorated negotiations are instead getting off to a false start.

Following the November appointment of Cecil

ia Malmstrom, the new European trade

commissioner, both sides pledged a âfresh startâ to talks over a

Trans

Atlantic Trade and

Investment Partnership

, or TTIP, that had been crawling along since beginning in July 2013.

But a senior US official told the Financial Times that Washington was disappointed with the

progress made in last weekâs round of formal negotiations, the first since the re

launch, and had

decided to press

its case with Ms Merkel on Monday and in European capitals in the coming

weeks.

That frustration was partly in evidence in Brussels last week. âThis weekâs round was

constructive, but we do need to see more, further concrete progress ... if we are to turn

this fresh

start into a reality,â the chief US negotiator, Dan Mullaney, told reporters on Friday as the

discussions wrapped up.

The US has in recent months been pressing the European Union to agree to exchange new offers

on the number of tariff

free goods

. Many see this as the easier part of the negotiations compared

with the more complex question of easing regulatory barriers to trade across the Atlantic.

Last year the US offered to eliminate tariffs on 88 per cent of goods traded between the two

economie

s, significantly lower than the 96 per cent put forward by the EU. But since then US

officials have been trying to improve their offer while also extracting more from the EU.

Liberalisation of services is another bone of contention for Washington, which is

irked that the

EU has refused to offer a similar package to that negotiated with Canada in a recently concluded

trade agreement.

The decision to raise the issue with Ms Merkel did not reflect any conflict between the German

chancellor and Mr Obama over TT

IP, the official said. Washington remains convinced she

supports the trans

Atlantic talks, in spite of

scepticism

among many Germans.

The concerns were instead focused on EU officials and the European Commission, the senior US

official said, and whether officials in Brussels were meeting their leadersâ desire for

more rapid

progress

. David Cameron, the UKâs prime minister, last year called for ârocket boostersâ to be

placed und

er the talks.

Two senior EU trade officials on Sunday dismissed the US concerns as âspinâ and told the FT

that they hoped to exchange new tariffs and services offers by July.

The EU officials also said that there had been progress in discussions over the i

nclusion of

financial services regulation in TTIP, something the US side has resisted in part because of fears

that it might water down the strict Dodd

Franck regulations introduced in the wake of the 2008

crisis.

But the disagreement highlights how tensio

ns remain between both sides despite efforts to make

a fresh start.

European officials have also privately raised concerns that Mr Obamaâs administration is more

focused on sealing a 12

country Pacific Rim trade agreement now nearing conclusion, the Trans

Pacific Partnership, or TPP, than the trans

Atlantic one.

Speaking at a security conference in Munich on Saturday, Vice President Joe Biden sought to

placate the EU. âTTIP is not the stepchild to TPP,â the vice president

said

âWe have not taken our focus off of Europe. We have not decide

d that the future lies in the

Pacific Basin. We are a Pacific power. We will assert that power, and we will remain a Pacific

power. But we are also an Atlantic power.â

Xerox: Adapting to the Turbulent Marketing Environment Xerox introduced the first plain-paper office copier more than 50 years ago. In the decades that followed, the company that invented photocopying flat-out dominated the industry it had created. The name Xerox became almost generic for copying (as in Xerox this for you). Through the years, Xerox fought off round after round of rivals to stay atop the fiercely competitive copier industry. Through the late 1990s, Xerox's profits and stock price were soaring. Then things went terribly wrong for Xerox. The legendary company's stock and fortunes took a stomach-churning dive. In only 18 months, Xerox lost some $38 billion in market value. Its stock price plunged from almost $70 in 1999 to under $5 by mid-2001. The once-dominant market leader found itself on the brink of bankruptcy. What happened? Blame it on change or rather on Xerox's failure to adapt to its rapidly changing marketing environment. The world was quickly going digital, but Xerox hadn't kept up. In the new digital environment, Xerox customers no longer relied on the company's flagship products' standalone copiers to share information and documents. Rather than pumping out and distributing stacks of black-and-white copies, they created digital documents and shared them electronically. Or they printed out multiple copies on their nearby networked printer. On a broader level, while Xerox was busy perfecting copy machines, customers were looking for more sophisticated document management solutions. They wanted systems that would let them scan documents in Frankfurt, weave them into colorful, customized showpieces in San Francisco, and print them on-demand in London even altering for American spelling. This left Xerox on the edge of financial disaster. We didn't have any cash and few prospects for making an, says current Xerox CEO, Ursula Burns.The one thing you wanted was good and strong leaders that were aligned and could get us through things and we didn't have that. Burns didn't realize it back then, but she would one day lead the company she began working for as a summer intern in 1981. In fact, Burns almost left the company in 2000, but her colleague and friend, Anne Mulcahy, became CEO and convinced her to stay. Burns was named a senior vice president and was then charged with cleaning the house. The Turnaround Begins Task number one: Outsource Xerox's manufacturing. An often criticized and unpopular move, outsourcing was critical to Xerox's cost-saving efforts. Burns oversaw the process in a way that preserved quality while achieving the desired cost benefits. And she did so with the blessing of Xerox's employee union by convincing the union that it was either lose some jobs or have no jobs at all. With the restructuring of manufacturing, in only four years, Xerox's workforce dropped from 100,000 employees to 55,000. Although this and other efforts returned Xerox to profitability within a few years, the bigger question still remained: What business is Xerox really in? To answer this question, Xerox renewed its focus on the customer. Xerox had always focused on copier hardware. But we were being dragged by our customers into managing large, complex business processes for them, says Burns. Before developing new products, Xerox researchers held seemingly endless customer focus groups. Sophie Vandebroek, Xerox's chief technology officer, called this dreaming with the customer. The goal, she argued, was involving [Xerox] experts who know the technology with customers who know the pain points. . . . Ultimately innovation is about delighting the customer. In the process, Xerox discovered that understanding customers is just as important as understanding technology. What Xerox learned is that customers didn't want just copiers; they wanted easier, faster, and less costly ways to share documents and information. As a result, the company had to rethink, redefine, and reinvent itself. Xerox underwent a remarkable transformation. It stopped defining itself as a copier company. In fact, it even stopped making standalone copiers. Instead, Xerox began billing itself as the world's leading document management technology and services enterprise. The company's newly minted mission was to help companies be smarter about their documents. This shift in emphasis created new customer relationships, as well as new competitors. Instead of selling copiers to equipment purchasing managers, Xerox found itself developing and selling document management systems to high-level information technology managers. Instead of competing head-on with copy machine competitors like Sharp, Canon, and Ricoh, Xerox was now squaring off against information technology companies like HP and IBM. Although it encountered many potholes along the way, the company once known as the iconic copier company became increasingly comfortable with its new identity as a document-management company. Building New Strengths Xerox's revenue, profits, and stock price began to show signs of recovery. But before it could declare its troubles over, yet another challenging environmental force arose the Great Recession. The recession severely depressed Xerox's core printing and copying equipment and services business, and the company's sales and the stock price tumbled once again. So in a major move to maintain its transition momentum, Xerox acquired Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), a $6.4 billion information technology (IT) services powerhouse with a foot in the door of seemingly every back office in the world. The expertise, capabilities, and established channels of ACS were just what Xerox needed to take its new business plan to fruition. The synergy between Xerox, ACS, and other acquired companies has resulted in a broad portfolio of customer-focused products, software, and services that help Xerox's customers manage documents and information. In fact, Xerox has introduced more than 130 innovative new products in the past four years. It now offers digital products and systems ranging from network printers and multifunction devices to color printing and publishing systems, digital presses, and book factories. It also offers an impressive array of print management consulting and outsourcing services that help businesses develop online document archives, operating in-house print shops or mailrooms, analyze how employees can most efficiently share documents and knowledge, and build Internet-based processes for personalizing direct mail, invoices, and brochures. These new products have allowed Xerox to supply solutions to clients, not just hardware. For example, Xerox has a new device for insurance company customers, a compact computer with scanning, printing, and Internet capabilities. Instead of relying on the U.S. Postal Service to transport hard copies of claims, these and related documents are scanned on-site, sorted, routed, and put immediately into a workflow system. This isn't just a fancy new gadget for the insurance companies. They are seeing real benefits. Error rates have plummeted along with processing times, and that means increases in revenues and customer satisfaction. Dreaming Beyond Its Boundaries Riding the combination of Xerox's former strengths and its new acquisitions, Burns and the Xerox team now have a utopian image of what lies ahead. They believe the tools and services they offer clients are getting smarter. It's not just processing Medicaid payments, says Stephen Hoover, director of Xerox's research facilities. It's using our social cognition research to add wellness support that helps people better manage conditions like diabetes. Hoover adds that the future may see a new generation of Xerox devices, such as those that can analyze real-time parking and traffic data for municipal customers, allowing them to help citizens locate parking spots or automatically ticket them when they are going too fast. Already, Xerox is market testing parking meters that are capable of calling 911 or taking photos when a button is pushed. Not all products such as these will hit the market, but Xerox now has a model that allows it to dream beyond its known boundaries. In another example of smarter tools for clients, Xerox will soon rollout Ignite, a software and Web-based service that turns its copiers/scanners/printers already in service at schools around the world into paper-grading machines. Previous automated grading technologies (such as Scantron) worked only on multiple-choice responses filled out on special forms. But Ignite will grade work where answers are written in by students even numeric math problems. The real revolutionary potential of Ignite, however, is not just in automated grading, but in taking the results and turning them into Web-accessible data that allow teachers to identify problem areas and make improvements to their techniques. Throughout this corporate metamorphosis, Xerox isn't focused on trying to make better copiers. Rather, it is focused on improving any process that a business or government customer needs to perform and performing it more efficiently. Xerox's new machines have learned to read and understand the documents they scan, reducing complex tasks that once took weeks down to minutes or even seconds. From now on, Xerox wants to be leading global document management and business-process technology and services, provider. With all the dazzling technologies emerging today, Burns acknowledges that the business services industry in which Xerox now operates is decidedly unsexy. But she also points out that these are processes that companies need to run their businesses. They do it as a sideline; it's not their main thing. But running these seemingly mundane business processes is now Xerox's main thing. Xerox provides these basic document and IT services to customers so that customers can focus on what matters most to their real businesses. Xerox's transition is still a work in progress. Over the last four years, the company's revenues are up 47 percent and profits have more than doubled. Its stock price, however, has struggled (it has yet to top $12), a sign that Xerox isn't doing as well as Wall Street thinks it should be. Part of the reason is that Xerox still relies to some extent on its copier and printer products for its success, even with its recent diversification strategy. And just as e-mail and desktop software killed photocopying, smartphones and tablets are killing inkjet and photo printers. But Xerox depends much less on such products than competitors such as Hewlett-Packard and Lexmark International do. Thus, experts predict, Xerox will rebound much more quickly than its rivals. Burns and crew are also confident that as Xerox continues its transition to a solutions provider, the seeds it has planted over the past few years will soon bear fruit. Xerox knows that change and renewal are ongoing and never-ending. The one thing that's predictable about business is that it's fundamentally unpredictable says the company's annual report. Macro forces such as globalization, emerging technologies, and, most recently, depressed financial markets bring new challenges every day to businesses of all sizes. The message is clear. Even the most dominant companies can be vulnerable to the often turbulent and changing marketing environment. Companies that understand and adapt well to their environments can thrive. Those that don't risk their very survival. Questions for discussion:

1. What microenvironmental factors have affected Xerox's performance since the late 1990s?

2. What macroenvironmental factors have affected Xerox's performance during that period?

3. By focusing on the business services industry, has Xerox pursued the best strategy? Why or why not?

4. What alternative strategy might Xerox have pursued following the first signs of declining revenues and profits?

5. Given Xerox's current situation, what recommendations would you make to Burns for the future of Xerox?

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