Is the tech sector past "synergies"?
When an industry sector is immature, nobody knows what the right divisions are between companies. The technology sector has clearly gone through many iterations of asking itself this question: hardware and software used to be provided as part of the same package, but now they are almost completely separate. Internet access, hosting, web design, domain registration and software development used to overlap (at Inon we provided all of these services in the late 1990s) but now it's rare to see someone offering more than one or two of these. There are roles for integrators, but the integrator usually subcontracts a large share of project revenue (60-80%) to third party specialists and retain only the consultancy element in-house. So is it time for BT to sell Global Services? Robert Peston has an analysis of their losses today, and it doesn't look good. Ten years ago most customers didn't really understand the Internet, and how it related to existing software, hardware and commu...