Micron writes off $1.43B in inventory as sales dive, claims only way is up Micron has had another bad quarter – one of its largest quarterly losses ever – with revenues plunging and predictions of further workforce reductions, but claims its performance was in line with expectations, saying it expects to see a return to growth in the near future. The memory chipmaker reported revenue of $3.69 billion …
Or...everyone has a webcam now and since there hasn't been any revolutionary new tech in the webcam space for ages (how long has 720p been the default webcam resolution), nobody needs to buy another.
Also, I don't know where in the world you are, but here in the UK...everything is still pretty hybrid here...most firms I work for have the majority of their staff working remotely now. With the odd office visit once or twice a fortnight.
I've had two meetings this week (virtual) with two separate clients (1000+ employees) to discuss the possibility of getting rid of their buildings and relocating the servers / internal platforms to datacentres / "The Cloud".
Working from home is very much here to stay. I think in the medium to long run the "bog standard" office PC segment of the market is the one to watch...your standard i5 / 8GB RAM Optiplex style system. That's going to go into rapid decline at some point because laptops are just easier to deploy to remote workers and you don't have to faff around shipping screens and peripherals etc.
Laptops are horrific for long term use, they're already causing a lot of back, neck and shoulder repetitive strain injuries.
They're also a lot more expensive for equivalent performance, and the docks are now universally awful.
Plus keyboard crumbs killing the whole thing, of course. A keyboard can be shaken out, a laptop, not so much.
The long-term corporate trend will be back to mostly desktops - though probably primarily a mix of small form factor and all-in-ones, as in-service upgrades generally aren't needed.
It's ergonomics.
Docks are shit because as far as I am aware, only one company makes USB dock chipsets...DisplayLink...they must have some sort of patent or something that stops anyone else making docks.
It doesn't matter how much you spend on a dock, it will likely have one of the very few chipsets they make which are all shit. Infuriatingly shit.
To give you an example of why they are shit...a client I work for, bought a ton of "high end" docks at one stage, and to begin with, they were fine...but a few months later, I upgraded all the network switches to increase the backbone of the network to 10gbps...we didn't realise how bottle necked the network was until all the docks started shitting the bed. They were being used for an extra screen, network and peripherals...as soon as it became actually possible to saturate the 1gbps network port, the docks just ran out of bandwidth to be able to do anything.
Took us a while to figure out as well because absolutely none of us thought "huh, maybe the docks don't have enough bandwidth to handle a 1080p display and 1gbps of network traffic.
The problem manifested itself as the screens flickering or going completely blank when initiating a download from somewhere and the mice starting to judder around.
Initially we thought a dodgy Windows update might have been the culprit because it affected almost everyone...then eventually I twigged on that it was the docks because I had to remove a dock from someones machine because it died and I shifted them to using the ports on their laptop instead. I noticed that the symptoms stopped immediately and the entire machine felt orders of magnitude more stable and snappy.
It took even longer for me to convince the fuckwits at the top that it was the docks causing the problems.
The initial solution was to buy "better docks"...which we did, docks that cost twice as much...but I quickly learned that the chipset in these "better docks" was essentially the same and the same problem occurred...after weeks of scouring the internet to find docks that didn't have DisplayLink chips in, I drew a complete blank.
It might be different now, this was about 8 years ago now...but Jesus Christ are DisplayLink docks shit.
I'm angry thinking about it.
"The memory chipmaker reported revenue of $3.69 billion for its second quarter of fiscal 2023 ended March 2. This was down from $4.09 billion in the previous quarter, and a whopping 53 percent fall from the $7.79 billion it reported for the second quarter a year ago, when the company was still riding the hike in demand following the pandemic.
Micron also made a net loss of $2.31 billion for the quarter...
A simple use of maths says that $3.69bil income + $2.31bil loss = $6.0billion a QUARTER just to keep the doors open. That's means Micron is a company demanding $24 billion a year...just to 'break even'.
That does NOT sound healthy. Someone really should be knocking on those C-suite doors, asking how can you justify maintaining a company with that level of overhead??
Or...are they are simply cooking those numbers to look the way they want them to (read: lower shareholder dividends)? Hmm. o_O
Oh they do, they just surface in places you don't expect...
The IT department suddenly ends up with a pile of machines used by nobody and they end up getting doled out for years...which saves money because the company doesn't have to buy new kit.
Suddenly IT has a massive glut of spare kit...so the beancounters figure they can reduce the budget...yay! Massive paper saving!
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