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Updated 2024-05-05 05:31
Predictions 5 & 6: Drones and driverless cars? Not this year
When it comes to predictions it is often easiest just to take some really popular new technology and point out the obvious time it will take to be actually adopted. You could say I’m doing that here with drone deliveries and driverless cars, but I like to think my value-added is explaining why these will take so much longer than some people expect. Amazon.com has been making a lot of noise about using small helicopter drones to deliver packages. I’m not here to say this is an impossible task or that drones won’t at some point be used for this purpose, but what I am saying is that it won’t happen this year, won’t happen next year, and in any true volume won’t happen even five […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Predictions #2 (and 3?): Microsoft and Apple hit walls
It isn’t easy being huge as both Apple and Microsoft are starting to realize. Both companies are incredibly successful and I’m not here to say either is in real danger, but both are suffering major structural challenges that will hurt them in 2016. What’s key for these predictions is how they respond. I’ll deal with Microsoft first because there the challenges and solutions are both clearer than they are with Apple. I’ve been very impressed with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella who I think hasn’t saved the company, because it didn’t need saving, but he’s a real improvement over Steve Ballmer. Nadella has done the best he can to get Microsoft in order and reinvigorated, not an easy job. His major remaining challenges involve Windows Phone […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
2016 Prediction #1 — Beginning of the end for engineering workstations
First a look at my predictions from one year ago and how they appear in the light of today: Prediction #1 — Everyone gets the crap scared out of them by data security problems. Go to the original column (link just above) to read the details of this and all the other 2015 predictions but the gist of it was that 2015 would be terrible for data security and the bad guys would find at least a couple new ways to make money from their hobby. I say I got this one right — one for one. Prediction #2 — Google starts stealing lunch money. The title is 100 percent smart-ass but my point (again, read the details) is that reality was finally intruding on Google and […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Welcome to 2016 Predictions Week!
Readers love predictions so for 15 years or so I’ve been making lots of them during the first full week of each new year. The first time I did a predictions column it was because I couldn’t think of anything else to write about that day and the reaction from readers was so strong that I’ve been stuck doing them ever since. What started as one column per year filled with about 10 predictions has expanded over time to as many as 10 separate predictions columns because as I age I am becoming ever more long-winded. Sorry. It’s reached the point this year where this introductory column won’t even contain predictions, just a guide to the several columns that will follow in the next few […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
My fridge is listening to me
It seems oddly fitting that this week — a week scarred by the bizarre and violent mass murder in San Bernardino — that I received a LinkedIn invitation to connect with someone who listed this as their job description: Install, maintain, and repair GPS, WiFi, and security camera systems on tour buses. In 2010, working with grant money from Homeland Security, I installed security systems on a fleet of tour buses and I have been maintaining those systems since then. In 2011, I helped install multi-language listening systems on tour buses and have been the lead maintenance technician. Currently, I am project manager for upgrading a fleet of 50 tour buses with new GPS systems using Homeland Security grant monies. This requires coordinating with engineers of service providers […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Soylent Green — Now Made with More Women!
Soylent Green is the punchline of a bad joke told to me at the breakfast table by Channing, my 13 year-old son, but in a way it is fitting for this column about women executives in danger of being chewed-up by their corporate machines. And kudos to you if you caught the reference to Edward G. Robinson’s final film — about an over-populated world where people are recycled into cookies. First up is Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, whom I’m told is rapidly losing the support of her hand-picked board. Mayer, who is expecting twins, will probably not be returning from her upcoming maternity leave and Wall Street has begun speculating about possible successors. Hers would have been a tough gig for anyone. Yahoo is asset-rich […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Amazon’s cloud monopoly
Earlier this year two different research reports came out describing the overall cloud computing market and Amazon’s role in it. Synergy Research Group saw Amazon as by far the biggest player (bigger in fact than the next four companies combined) with about 30 percent market share. But Gartner, taking perhaps a more focussed view of just the public cloud, claimed Amazon holds 82 percent of the market with cloud capacity that’s 10 times greater than all the other public cloud providers combined. I wonder how these disparate views can be possible describing the same company? And I wonder, further, whether this means Amazon actually has a cloud monopoly? Yup, it’s a monopoly. Amazon has monopoly power over the public cloud because it clearly sets the […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Why Yahoo is worth less than nothing
A reader pointed out to me today that Yahoo, minus its Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stakes plus cash, is now worth less than nothing according to Wall Street. This says a lot about Yahoo but even more about Wall Street, since the core company is still profitable if in decline. If I were a trader (I’m not) that would argue Yahoo is a buy since there’s likely to be a future point at which the company will be free of those other riches and even Wall Street will be forced to give the carcass a positive value. But when I heard about the negative value story the first thing that came to mind was something my old friend Joe Adler said long ago about one […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Last chance to get a Mineserver™ for Christmas!
It took only two days for our three sons to reach their $15,000 Kickstarter funding goal and visions of building a kit car were dancing in their heads. Almost three weeks later, however, total pledges are just nearing $30,000, which puts profits more in the deluxe quadcopter range. Still good, but not a Manx dune buggy. But there is one more day to make your pledge — the only way to get a Mineserver™ or Mineserver Pro™ in time for Christmas. Along the way we gained the attention of Mojang, owners of Minecraft, who didn’t like our logo so the boys held a contest with the winner (from Hamilton, New Zealand!) getting a free Mineserver Pro™. We like the new logo even better and have found […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
It’s Michael Dell versus the world and Dell will win
In my last column I wrote that Dell buying EMC is a great idea (for Dell) and left it to this column to more fully explain why that is so. It takes two columns because there is so much going on here in terms of both business models and technologies. As the title suggests it comes down to Michael Dell against the world and in this case I predict Dell will win, Cisco, HP and IBM will lose, Apple will be relatively unaffected and I don’t really know what it will mean for Microsoft but I think the advantage still lies with Dell. One thing that is key is every one of these companies except Dell is publicly traded and answerable to Wall Street while […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Dell buys EMC and gets the corporate cloud for free
The Wall $treet Journal carried a story last week about Dell Computer possibly buying EMC, the big storage vendor, and this morning the New York Times confirmed it, pinning a price of $65 billion on the deal. There’s a lot to wonder about in this combination, which I think is pretty brilliant on Dell’s part even if I’m not generally in favor of mega-mergers. But it seems to me most of the experts commenting on the deal have it ass-backwards as Wall Street once again proves it doesn’t really understand technology business. EMC has this large but aging storage division and a valuable subsidiary in VMware, of which EMC owns 80 percent. Activist investors have been rumbling that EMC should spin-off VMware to EMC shareholders […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
The Cringely boys Kickstart Mineserver™, a $99 Minecraft server
When my three sons, ages 13, 11, and 9 decided to do a summer business together I thought it could be almost anything. After all, they’ve visited three dozen tech startups with me in our RV and they’ve been surrounded by technology entrepreneurs their entire lives. What business would it be? I just never expected a $99 Minecraft server. It’s brilliant, really. Minecraft is hugely popular but the Minecraft hardware market is almost nonexistent. It’s not that nobody thought to do such a server but that it’s a business idea most entrepreneurs would see as not having legs. It will scale, sure, but will it endure? In a few months someone — no doubt someone in Asia — will copy the idea, sucking all the […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Chinese talking cybersecurity means security is already lost
A longtime reader and good friend of mine sent me a link this week to a CNBC story about the loss of fingerprint records in the Office of Personnel Management hack I have written about before. It’s just one more nail in the coffin of a doltish bureaucracy that — you know I’m speaking the truth here — will probably result in those doltish bureaucrats getting even more power, even more data, and ultimately losing those data, too. So the story says they lost the fingerprint records of 56 million people! Game over. Remember how this story unfolded? There had been a hack and some records were compromised. Then there had been a hack and hundreds of thousands of records were compromised. Rinse-repeat almost ad […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine
Alex Gibney’s Steve Jobs documentary is available now in some theaters, on Amazon Instant Video and, ironically, on iTunes. It’s a film that purports to figure out what made Steve Jobs tick. And it does a lot, just not that. I’m not a dispassionate reviewer here. More than a year before Jobs died I tried to hire Alex Gibney to make a Steve Jobs film with me. At that point he suggested I be the director, that he’d coach me (“It’s not that hard,” the Oscar-winner claimed.) We talked and met but didn’t come to a deal. Later Gibney decided to do a Jobs film on his own — this film — and he came to me for help. We talked and met but again […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Another 9/11 anniversary passes quietly
I’ve been quiet lately, I know. My sons’ Kickstarter campaign has taken a toll on their Venture Capitalist… me. I never before appreciated the physical effort that goes into managing what is, for me, a significant investment. They do the work but I pay for a lot of it and that brings with it the need to oversee — something I’ve never been very good at doing. You’ll see the result, hopefully, next week. While I’ve been so preoccupied a lot has happened in the technology world. Apple introduced a slew of new products and Alex Gibney released his Steve Jobs documentary. I’ll comment on both of these shortly. Yahoo was denied its tax-free Alibaba spinoff and so has to go to Plan B. I […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Evil Google waiting on line one
Lately I have been getting telephone calls from Google. Do you get them, too? The numbers they come from are in many different cities but the callers always ask to speak to the business owner (that’s me) so I can claim my business listing and my free web site from Google. But I don’t want a business listing and I don’t need a free web site, I explain. Please take my name off your list. Then they tell me the first of many lies: “We can’t take you off our list.” Resistance is futile. Actually the script varies a little and sometimes they say “we won’t take you off,” not “we can’t take you off.” And once when I asked them to stop calling, just […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Google’s OnHub router may save WiFi from itself
Google this week introduced its first WiFi router and my initial reaction was “Why?” WiFi access points and home routers tend to be low-margin commodity products that could only hurt financial results for the search giant. What made it worth the pain on Wall Street, then, for Google to introduce this gizmo? And then I realized it is Google’s best hope to save the Internet… and itself. WiFi is everywhere and it generally sucks. WiFi has become the go-to method of networking homes and even businesses. I remember product introductions in New York back in the 80s and 90s when we were told over and over again that it cost $100 per foot to pull Ethernet cable in Manhattan (a price that was always blamed […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
How I (and you?) am hurting the PC industry
Starting in 1977 I bought a new personal computer every three years. This changed after 2010 when I was 33 years and eleven computers into the trend. That’s when I bought my current machine, a mid-2010 13-inch MacBook Pro. Five years later I have no immediate plans to replace the MacBook Pro and I think that goes a long way to explain why the PC industry is having sales problems. My rationale for changing computers over the years came down to Moore’s Law. I theorized that if computer performance was going to double every 18 months, I couldn’t afford to be more than one generation behind the state-of-the-art if I wanted to be taken seriously writing about this stuff. That meant buying a new PC […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Who is your IT outsourcing firm working for?
While the U.S. Government has been remarkably opaque about the recently discovered security breach at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), we know that personal information on at least 21.5 million present, former, and prospective federal employees was lost. The Feds claim Chinese hackers are at the bottom of it, which is disputed by the Chinese government. This, to me, raises a number of questions, especially about the possible role of IT outsourcing firms and implications for organizations beyond OPM. Does IT outsourcing make your data more vulnerable? Yes, I believe it does. It’s easy to blame the Office of Personnel Management for its own troubles. Oversight was lax. The agency failed a security audit and didn’t seem to do much in response. When shit […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
IBM is so screwed
I’ve been working on a big column or two about the Office of Personnel Management hack while at the same time helping my boys with their Kickstarter campaign to be announced in another 10 days, but then IBM had to go yesterday and announce earnings and I just couldn’t help myself. I had to put that announcement in the context you’ll see in the headline above. IBM is so screwed. Below you’ll see the news spelled-out in red annotations right on IBM’s own slides. The details are mainly there but before you read them I want to make three points. First, IBM’s sexy new businesses (cloud, analytics, mobile, social and security or CAMSS) aren’t growing — and probably won’t be growing — faster than its […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Remember when technology was exciting?
Al Mandel used to say “the step after ubiquity is invisibility” and man was he right about that. Above you’ll see a chart from the Google Computers and Electronics Index, which shows the ranking of queries using words like “Windows, Apple, HP, xBox, iPad” — you get the picture. The actual terms have changed a bit since the index started in 2004 as products and companies have come and gone, but my point here is the general decline. Just as Al predicted, as technology has become more vital to our lives we’ve paradoxically become less interested, or at least do less reaching out. Maybe this is because technologies become easier to use over time or we have more local knowledge (our kids and co-workers helping us […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
The U.S. computer industry is dying and I’ll tell you exactly who is killing it and why
This is my promised third column in a series about the effect of H-1B visa abuse on U.S. technology workers and ultimately on the U.S. economy. This time I want to take a very high-level view of the problem that may not even mention words like “H-1B” or even “immigration,” replacing them with stronger Anglo-Saxon terms like “greed” and “indifference.” The truth is that much (but not all) of the American technology industry is being led by what my late mother would have called “assholes.” And those assholes are needlessly destroying the very industry that made them rich. It started in the 1970s when a couple of obscure academics created a creaky logical structure for turning corporate executives from managers to rock stars, all in […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Fathers Day 2015
Fathers Day 2015 Web Design. WordPress.SEO
The H-1B visa program is a scam
This is the second of three columns relating to the recent story of Disney replacing 250 IT workers with foreign workers holding H-1B visas. Over the years I have written many columns about outsourcing (here) and the H-1B visa program in particular (here). Not wanting to just cover again that old material, this column looks at an important misconception that underlies the whole H-1B problem, then gives the unique view of a longtime reader of this column who has H-1B program experience. First the misconception as laid out in a blog post shared with me by a reader. This blogger maintains that we wouldn’t be so bound to H-1Bs if we had better technical training programs in our schools. This is a popular theme with […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Disney’s IT troubles go beyond H-IBs
Disney has been in the news recently for firing its Orlando-based IT staff, replacing them with H-1B workers primarily from India, and making severance payments to those displaced workers dependent on the outgoing workers training their foreign replacements. I regret not jumping on this story earlier because I heard about it back in March, but an IT friend in Orlando (not from Disney) said it was old news so I didn’t follow-up. Well now I am following with what will eventually be three columns not just about this particular event but what it says about the U.S. computer industry, which is not good. First we need some context for this Disney event — context that has not been provided in any of the accounts I […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Autodesk’s John Walker explained HP and IBM in 1991
One reader of this column in particular has been urging me to abandon for a moment my obsession with IBM and look, instead, at his employer — Hewlett Packard. HP, he tells me, suffers from all the same problems as IBM while lacking IBM’s depth and resources. And he’s correct: HP is a shadow of its former self and probably doomed if it continues to follow its current course. I’ve explained some of this before in an earlier column, and another, and another you might want to re-read. More of HP’s problems are covered in a very fine presentation you can read here. Were I to follow a familiar path at this point I’d be laying out a long list of HP mistakes. And while I […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Apple TV’s 4K Future
On June 8th at the Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), CEO Tim Cook will reportedly introduce a new and improved Apple TV. For those who live under rocks this doesn’t mean a television made by Apple but rather a new version of the Apple TV set top box that 25 million people have bought to download and stream video from the Internet. But this new Apple TV — the first Apple TV hardware update in three years — will not, we’re told, support 3840-by-2160 UHD (popularly called 4K) video and will be limited to plain old 1920-by-1080 HD. Can this be true? Well, yes and no. The new Apple TV will be 4K capable, but not 4K enabled. This distinction is critical to understanding […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Sadie’s Apple Watch Arrived Two Weeks Early
This is Sadie the Dog wearing her new Apple Watch. The watch actually belongs to my young and lovely wife, Mary Alyce, but she was unwilling to be photographed this morning while Sadie will pose anytime, anywhere. This is the Sport model of the Apple Watch in space gray with a black band. What makes this picture interesting is the watch was delivered last Friday two weeks early. I ordered the watch on the first day Apple was taking orders but didn’t do so in the middle of the night so I missed the first batch of watches that were delivered in April. It was promised for delivery June first. Since then there have been stories about faulty sensors and other suggestions that watch deliveries might […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
The KickStarter Paradox
Among the great business innovations of the Internet era are KickStarter and the many similar crowdfunding sites like IndieGoGo. You know how these work: someone wants to introduce a new gizmo or make a film but can only do so if you and I pay in advance with our only rewards being a possible discount on the gizmo or DVD. Oh, and a t-shirt. Never before was there a way to get people — sometimes thousands of people — to pay for stuff not only before it was built but often before the inventors even knew how to build it. From the Pebble smart watch to Veronica Mars, crowdfunding success stories are legion and crowdfunding failures quickly forgotten. I’ve been thinking a lot about crowdfunding […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Your PBX has been hacked!
This past week a very large corporation on the east coast was hacked in what seems to naive old me to be a new way — through their corporate phone system. Then one night during the same week I got a call from my bank saying my account had been compromised and to press #4 to talk to their security department. My account was fine: it was a telephone-based phishing expedition. Our phone network has been compromised, folks, and nobody with a phone is safe. Edward Snowden was right we’re not secure, though this time I don’t think the National Security Agency is involved. Here’s how this PBX hack came down. Step one begins with looking for companies that have outsourced their IT help desk […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
A tale of three voicemails
Update – Audio problem solved (I hope). Just click on the play button at the bottom of the text. Sorry. I have three sons, Channing, Cole, and Fallon, who as of this week are 13, 11, and 9, respectively. They are all bright boys, full of energy, and completely different from each other. You can see this even in their approach to voicemail. Each kid goes to a different school and since this mountain we live on has never seen a school bus that means one of us (usually Mama) drives to three schools, dropping a kid at each. To coordinate all this, we thought it was important for every kid to have a phone — all Samsung Galaxy S5’s. Yes, I have Android children. […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
AWS shows Cloud is NOT a high-margin business
Last week Amazon.com was the first of the large cloud service companies other than Rackspace to finally break out revenue and expenses for its cloud operation. The market was cheered by news that Amazon Web Services (AWS) last quarter made an operating profit of $265 million with an operating profit margin of 19.6 percent. AWS, which many thought was running at break-even or possibly at a loss, turns out to be for Amazon a $5 billion business generating a third of the company’s total profits. That’s good, right? Not if it establishes a benchmark for typical-to-good cloud service provider performance. In fact it suggests that some companies — IBM especially — are going to have a very difficult time finding success in the cloud. First […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Where the money is… or was
Today was Tax Day in the United States, when we file our federal income tax returns. This has been an odd tax season in America for reasons that aren’t at all clear, but I am developing a theory that cybersecurity failures may shortly bring certain aspects of the U.S. economy to its knees. I have been writing about data security and hacking and malware and identity theft since the late 1990s. It is a raft of problems that taken together amount to tens of billions of dollars each year in lost funds, defensive IT spending, and law enforcement expenditures. Now with a 2014 U.S. Gross Domestic Product of $17.42 trillion, a few tens of billions are an annoyance at most. Say the total hit is […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
The Net Neutrality Mystery
My friend Andy Regitsky, whom I have known for more than 30 years, follows the FCC, blogs about them, and teaches courses on — among other things — how to read and understand their confusing orders. Andy knows more about the FCC than most of the people who work there and Andy says the new Net Neutrality order will probably not stand. I wonder if it was even meant to? You can read Andy’s post here. He doesn’t specifically disagree with my analysis from a few days ago, but goes further to show some very specific legal and procedural problems with the order that could lead to it being killed in court or made moot by new legislation. It’s compelling: Andy is probably right. I’m […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
The Indiana Pi Bill, Ellen Pao, and IBM
The Indiana Legislature is in the news for passing a state law considered by many to be anti-gay. It reminded me of the famous Pi Bill — Bill #246 of the 1897 Indiana General Assembly. There’s a good account of the bill on Wikipedia, but the short story is a doctor and amateur mathematician wanted the state to codify his particular method of squaring the circle, a side effect of which would be officially declaring the value of π to be 3.2. The bill was written by Representative Taylor I. Record, sent to the Education Committee where it passed, went back to the Indiana House of Representatives where it again passed, unopposed. Then the bill went to the Indiana Senate where Professor C.A. Waldo of […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Net Neutrality, Apple, and the future of TV
I’ve been hesitant to comment on the FCC’s proposed Net Neutrality rules until I could read them. You’ll recall the actual rules weren’t released at the time of the vote a couple weeks ago, just characterized this way and that for the press pending the eventual release of the actual order. Well they finally published the rules last week and I’ve since made my way through all 400+ pages (no executive summary commenting for me). And while there are no big surprises — much less smoking guns — in the FCC report, I think that taken along with this week’s Wall Street Journal story about an Apple over-the-top (OTT) video service the trend is clear that the days of traditional cable TV are numbered. What […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Be a cloud storage tycoon with Google Nearline
Update — Reader Justin Fischer points out my math below is off. Interestingly I wasn’t the only reporter to make this mistake. Sorry. If you have an entrepreneurial bent it’s hard not to see an opportunity to start the next big cloud storage company in last week’s Nearline Storage announcement by Google. I saw it immediately. So did Google make a big pricing mistake? Probably not. Nearline storage usually means files stored on tapes in automated libraries. You ask for the file and a robot arm loads the tape giving you access to your data in a couple minutes. Google’s version of nearline storage is way faster, promising file access in three seconds or less. They don’t say how it works but it makes sense […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
The sky is falling and the FAA isn’t ready
According to a new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the U.S. airspace system is incredibly vulnerable to hacking and a state-sponsored hacking effort could paralyze air traffic over North America. Very scary stuff. And as a licensed pilot for 45 years, I can tell you that it’s both true and not true, that the system is horribly hackable but that very vulnerability might be what we need to stimulate real airspace innovation. Ask any American pilot how they feel about the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and you’ll get variations on the same negative theme. It’s not that pilots love-hate the FAA: there’s no love about it. Pilots tend to hate-ignore the FAA, which is generally viewed as a vindictive regulatory agency […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Entrepreneurism and the politics of hope
I’m an older guy with younger kids so to some extent I live vicariously through my friends, many of whom have children who are now entering the work force and some of those children can’t find jobs. We’re not in a recession, the economy is expanding, new positions are supposedly being added every day, but the sons and daughters of my friends aren’t generally getting those jobs so they are staying in school or going back to school, joining the Peace Corps., whatever. Everyone is rattled by this. Kids don’t want to move home and parents don’t want to have them move home. Student debt continues to increase. Everyone wants to get on with the lives they thought they were promised — the lives they’d […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Reporter’s Notebook: Yahoo, IBM, IEEE and me
I haven’t been writing as much lately. This has been for several reasons, some of which may surprise you. It’s true I’ve had to spend a lot of time fending-off attacks from IBM corporate (more on that below) but I’ve mainly been at work on two secret projects. One is a new documentary series for PBS and the other a new technology startup I’m doing with a partner. The PBS series will be announced when PBS decides to announce it but most of the shooting is already done. The startup has taken the traditional VC route and looks, surprisingly, like it will actually be funded. Evidently if your idea is wild enough and your partner is smart enough it’s still possible for an idiot (that […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
Remembering Radio Shack
With Radio Shack having declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, with hundreds of stores closing and others possibly becoming Sprint locations, let’s take a moment to look back at the important contributions the company made in the early days of personal computing. Charles Tandy started the Tandy Leather Company which opened hundreds of little shops in the 1950s selling kits for consumers to make their own tooled leather belts, for example. I made one in 1959, burning my name into the belt with a soldering iron. As leather craft faded as a hobby and electronics boomed many of those Tandy Leather stores became Radio Shacks (but not all — a few leather stores survive even today). Radio Shack stores always had the advantage of proximity balanced by […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
IBM is right, I am a gadfly
gad·fly ˈɡadˌflī/ noun a fly that bites livestock, especially a horsefly, warble fly, or botfly. an annoying person, especially one who provokes others into action by criticism. Sometimes being a gadfly is exactly what’s required. That’s certainly the case with IBM and has been for the almost eight years I’ve been following this depressing story. Gadflies came up because IBM finally reacted today to my last column predicting a massive force reduction this week. They denied it, of course — not the workforce reduction but its size, saying there won’t be even close to 110,000 workers laid off — and they called me a gadfly, which was apparently intended as criticism, but I’m rather proud of it. So what’s the truth about these job […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
IBM’s reorg-from-Hell launches next week
IBM’s big layoff-cum-reorganization called Project Chrome kicks-off next week when 26 percent of IBM employees will get calls from their managers followed by thick envelopes on their doorsteps. By the end of February all 26 percent will be gone. I’m told this has been in the planning for months and I first heard about it back in November. This biggest reorganization in IBM history is going to be a nightmare for everyone and at first I expected it to be a failure for IBM management, too. But then I thought further and I think I’ve figured it out… I don’t think IBM management actually cares. More on this later. IBM really does not know how to do reorganizations, which are mostly political realignments. They come […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
2015 Predictions: It’s about the money, stupid!
It’s time, finally, for my long-delayed 2015 predictions. Things just kept changing so fast I had to keep re-writing, but have finally stopped. 2015 will definitely be the Year of Monetization, by which I mean it’s the year when the bottom line and showing profits will become a key motivator in almost every market. And while profit — like beer — is generally good, it isn’t always good for everyone. So here are my 10 predictions in no particular order. Prediction #1 — Everyone gets the crap scared out of them by data security problems. In many ways this was set up by 2014, a year when, between Edward Snowden and Target, America woke up to the dangers of lax data security. Where this year […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
2015 Will Be the Year When Nothing Happened
This was supposed to be time for my technology predictions for 2015, which I’ll get to yet, I promise, but first I want to explain the major trend I see, that 2015 will become known as The Year When Nothing Happened. Of course things will happen in 2015, but I think the year of truly revolutionary change will be 2016, not 2015. It takes time for trends to develop and revolutionary products to hit the market. I’d say the trends are clear, it’s the products and their manufacturers who aren’t yet identifiable. So here are three areas where I’ll disagree with most of my peers and say I don’t expect to see much visible progress in 2015. 1 — Data security. It will get a […] Web Design. WordPress.SEO
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