Posts by HonestAbe 28 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2015
"And so it will for every alternative for the cloud."
I don't think that's true. When the cost of idle infrastructure goes up it will put even more pressure on achieving 100% utilization to eliminate idle infrastructure. The cloud shines brightest on cloudy days, because of the higher processor and storage utilizattion of those capital investments.
Anyone who's ever seen buzzards fighting over a carcass recognizes this scene. Rending it to and fro, sometimes even lifting it into the air for a second or two.
It's all over for a Silicon Valley company when it becomes too sick to outrun the bean counters and marketers any longer. RIP Yahoo, and so many others recently.
Maybe "desperate" is a better word. If Microsoft couldn't get app developers to port to Windows, emulating Android would be a last-ditch attempt to create a critical mass of software. RIM had a similar project.
The real question is whether abandoning this indicates confidence or just cost cutting. Microsoft has been throwing money at developers to develop Windows apps. If they're gaining traction, that would explain the change. On the other hand, they're also laying people off right and left, which could also explain the change.
"my own view is that Meg's turnaround was turning out to be either completely or semi-mythical."
Yes, I think that's basically it. Whitman started out by intentionally lowering the bar -- tanking the share price through massive write-offs and trash-talking her predecessors. Classic "big bath" accounting scheme. She then promised a five-year "turnaround" to restore the company, but she couldn't even execute on that much lower expectation. Having run out of time, she tried to sell it off, but nobody wanted to buy all those disparate failing or declining businesses as a giant package. Now she's breaking them up into smaller bite-size chunks in the hope she can then find acquirers.
In a couple years, some ODM will buy the PC/printer part for just the brand recognition, I predict. No company is going to want the EDS side, though, because anyone can just poach EDS's last remaining talent through hiring. Whitman will then do what Carly has done -- go into politics. No tech company will ever again make the mistake of hiring her.
"Intel designed the NVMe interface specifically for those flash killers." Exactly. DSSD sounds cool, but it doesn't appear to compete with anything at the component level. Rather it appears to be leveraging the rise of NAND (and presumably Intel's new NAND-killer) to fully realize their potential in storage.
Sounds very cool, but if it's as good as Dell thinks then Oracle, HP, and IBM should be worried... and Intel, Micron, and Sanshiba should be rejoicing.
Rather than "end times," I'd call this the "end game". As in chess, there are few pieces left on the board, position and materiel advantage rapidly magnifies, and the losing player often just resigns.
Dell now seems well positioned to sweep up the last conventional IT by offering a complete solution, pushing the existing installed base toward it using their reliance on VMware and other Dell/EMC products, and enticing that installed base with an easy on-ramp into the cloud.
I'm confident that other old-style tech and consulting firms will now start tipping over their kings and bowing out very quickly. I'm less confident that Dell and his investors will make great fortunes from being victors, given how much money they've spent to be the winner. and how Amazon and Microsoft are arranging to take all the margins in cloud. But Dell is rich enough already, I guess.
Two or three times a year someone announces that they've identified another physical system capable of computing with qubits. Unfortunately, that alone is a lot like identifying a new fluid that one can blow soap bubbles from. That is not the really really difficult part.
Now imagine blowing a soap bubble as large as the continent of Europe, and keeping it from popping for a month despite all the gusts of wind and rain and lightning here and there. THAT is the hard part, and what is required for quantum computation to become useful.
Don't hold your breath (or rather, everyone do hold your breath to keep that bubble from popping).
This news could not have come at a better time for me. I've never in my life been more than a jeuvenile delinquent, and even that was an embarrassingly large number of decades ago during high school.
Now, however, thanks to some European bureaucrat I'd never heard of, I'M AN HONEST-TO-GOD OUTLAW. I can't wait to tell my five-year-old in the morning, since I thnk this will raise me a couple notches in his esteem.
The only downside is that my Silicon Valley job has nothing to do with European data.... just boring silicon.
"Edward Snowden denies making a deal with the Russian secret service"
He's not bright enough to now that he actually has made deals with them. Putin undoubtedly assigned his top KGB guys as Snowden's handlers, playing to Snowdens's ego and manipulating Snowden into developing useful ideologies.
The biggest lesson we should all take from all this is that no individual IT support person should ever, without a second and third set of eyes, be permitted to have access to anyone's confidential information. I've put that rule to work in my own job, and so should you.
"I believe that's called a memristor." (scoff...) No. That's called RRAM, PCRAM, MRAM, or a dozen other restistive memory types that people have been working on for the last 40 years, some of which have been commercially available for a long time. Looks like Intel and Micron have stuck a warp drive on one of those, but we won't know the details until the product hits the shelves.
That is a crossbar lattice, but Crossbar, Inc. didn't invent crossbar lattices, which are ancient. The magic is in the physics, materials, and manufacturing process... but none of my google searches have revealed what physics Intel/Micron are actually using. All I've seen are rumors that it's PCM, based on performance criteria.
Many people have suggested that. However, I still don't see why Microsoft would want to touch that tar baby. MSFT bought Nokia to force their OS into the phone market, but they certainly have no such challenge in the PC space.
To me, it seems more likely that Quanta or Foxconn would pick it up after the stock price falls far enough, just for the brand recognition (since it's their PCs HP rebrands and resells anyway... why not make it official, like HTC has). Other than some ODM that wants to buy the logo... maybe Canon would buy it to reduce competition and prop up prices in the declining inkjet market.
I expect that he'll buy HP. A year from now, after they've ditched the PC group, after the market gets a better view of just how moribund the server and services group is when it's not artificially propped up with ink margins, and after Wall Street finally tires of Whitman's empty PR blitzes, it will probably be very cheap. Ellison has already poached Hurd and Donatelli. They're probably drawing up plans for how to salvage the last remnants of HP, at this very instant.
Sigh. Not a single new technology release. Whitman runs through some buzz words she doesn't understand like "disruption" and "internet of things" and then quickly moves the audience's attention *away* from HP toward actual disruptive companies like Uber.
I felt so bad for Nefkins, Neri, and Youngjohns, who just looked embarassed and uncomfortable. No doubt they were thinking, while they were on stage, about their on-going discussions with corporate recruiters and career counsellors.
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