Could Facebook replace your email inbox

 

Face book is inviting press on a special event on Monday. Media and the corporate world are all speculating different stories. The most common speculation is that face book is launching an email service and trying to beat the giant email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail. In the current market facebook has more than 500 million which translates into lots of users online so we definitely cannot underestimate their targets. But on the other hand email giant has more than a billion user’s altogether. It is a fact that these email companies started acquiring their customers years before social media websites like facebook launched their services in the market so in comparison we can say that if facebook launches their email service worldwide it can be produce very tough competition for the three largest email providers.

Let’s look at some other services provided by facebook in the context of personal communication. Facebook has very strong basis in the area of personal communications. Facebook is already a leading service provider if we talk about standard email features such as POP, IMAP, attachments, forwarding and an.  I personally believe that facebook has a niche in the above mentioned areas of personal communication but when we talk about email services although there is a high possibility that facebook will attract new segment of the market (email service) but probably will not be able to take away the email giants users away. There could be many reasons this speculation. One of the most compelling fact is there are people whose email accounts are circulating among their friends, business, and so many other places and It would be really hard to make all these changes and move on to facebook. Second there is no compelling reason for the users to close their free email accounts and start a new account on face book and go through all these difficult changes. Existing users more or less atleast half of the population may try this new service but it would be really difficult to encourage users to deactivate or close their existing email accounts.

 

http://articles.cnn.com/tech/cashmore.facebook.email_1_facebook-users-facebook-one-facebook-messages?_s=PM:TECH

The Skills Gap

According to a recent article there exists a gap between the skills required by employers and what they are getting from recent graduates, but there is another gap.  There are differences between the perception of employers, students and educators.  This is a global issue and where the gap is the largest employers believe only 43% are qualified while educators think the number should be 83% (Mehta, 2012).  I agree with the educators.

Speaking from experience, many training pipelines only show that you are trainable.  The real knowledge and know how come on the job.  Doing the job itself is a learning experience.  Does not the resourced based view of the firm rely on organizational resources such as structure (Barney, 2001)?  How could a “graduate” obtain such expertise as part of the educational process?  The article mentions employers teaming with schools, but if these skills are unique then it would be a waste of time for at least some of the students.  While the employer would create a pool of talent from which to select, students not chosen are no more qualified.

Companies need to look at new “resources” (graduates) more like a raw material to be shaped and molded by the processes of the company instead of an “off the shelf” product.

 

Barney, J. (2001). Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage. Journal of Managment , 99-120.

Mehta, S. N. (2012, 12 05). The "skills gap": As bad as (almost) everyone thinks. Retrieved 12 05, 2012, from CNN Money: http://postcards.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/12/05/the-skills-gap-as-bad-as-almost-everyone-thinks/?iid=obnetwork