Posts by Big Wiggle

2009 IBM: Teleworking will save the WORLD! 2017 IBM: Get back to the office or else

Not Melissa Meyer's lead, but Meg Whitman

Melissa Meyer had good reason to end telecommuting at Yahoo. She even checked the VPN logs and found that many people were not working at all.

Meg Whitman, on the other hand, killed off telecommuting just to thin the herd at HP without any need for severance packages. VPN service at HP was so high that they ran out of licenses on a regular basis until they switched solutions. I always got out of bed a little early so I could logon before those licenses were gone.

IBM staffers are probably in for worse if things go the way of HP/HPE. Whitman even had people going through our locations taking roll call at random and reporting results to all managers.

Big blues: IBM's remote-worker crackdown is company-wide, including its engineers

Re: Improving morale? Eventually

Meg Whitman started doing this at HPE several years ago.

Michael Dell promises new EMC/Dell/VMware engineered systems

I'm calling it now. In less than one year Michael Dell goes back to being just Chairman of the Board and Pat Gelsinger will be the next CEO of Dell Technologies.

Sanjay Poonen will be the CEO of VMware.

Dell plans sale of non-core assets to reduce EMC buy debt

Re: Build 4K UHD displays on AIO Pc's

I generally agree with much of what you are saying here. Those things 'may' increase Dell's market share in a shrinking pie. However that pie is still shrinking. None of this changes the fact that consumer refresh cycles have grown from 2-3 years to 5-6 years. My own PC is 6 years old. I've upgraded with more RAM and SSDs and it is actually faster now, with Windows 10, than it was when new with Windows 7. I even run multiple virtual machines at times for research and this old core i7 quad core CPU just keeps chuggin' along. I can get another 2 or 3 years out of this system and be content with the performance.

Refresh cycles at the OEMs themselves have gotten longer. HP used to give their employees a new laptop every 3 years. Now it is 4 years and I've heard of people having to go 5 years between refreshes. If the very people that build these laptops are doing that, then you can bet good money that other businesses are doing the exact same thing.

So what do these guys need to do? For one, they are going to have to move forward with planned obsolescence. The AIO's you mention can help on this by having everything soldered onto the MOBO. Making it difficult or impossible to upgrade AIOs and Laptops can help force those refresh cycles down. Microsoft, Apple, and perhaps Google need to develop new services, apps, peripheral devices, etc., that will drive up resource utilization and require new device ports. Legacy hardware support must end much sooner than it has in the past for Windows based devices. Apple has been doing this for years without too much complaining from their customers. MS can continue to give away their OS but they need to cut way back on how long they will support legacy hardware.

A lot of us techies will call bullsh!t on this but the majority of consumers won't. You may seem more techies building their own systems so they can stretch the refresh cycle but that will only have a marginal effect on PC sales.. Bottom line is that PC OEMs must fine a way to get that refresh cycle down or they are going to face continued commoditization of their product and eventual wide spread consolidation of their industry.

Hey Windows 10, weren't you supposed to help PC sales?

Why buy a new PC?

I'm sitting here with a 6 year old PC that has a core i7 CPU, 24GB RAM, and dual SSDs. The memory and storage upgrades have made this system perform better than the day I bought it. It can handle Win10 and multiple apps with little effort.

I may upgrade to or build a new system this year, but if I'm honest about it, I really don't need to do that yet.

VMware says vSphere in decline, new multi-cloud plan will ensure growth

Re: @Paul Crawford Price

The Host Client Interface is supposedly going to become the vCenter interface in the near future.

Rumor mill in overdrive as Dell pumps up Perot price, Atos offers $4.3bn

Unfortunately I fear this will just lead to more job cuts in Plano.

Walking away from VirtuStream is the right thing for VMware to do

Perhaps its time for VMware to consider giving vSphere away. Not just ESXi, but vCenter as well. It doesn't need to be the Enterprise Plus version vSphere, but there needs to be enough there get companies to use vSphere as that on ramp to the cloud as the article mentions. VMware can make it's money with all the cloud tie ins and it's portfolio of products that support or extend the capabilities of vSphere.

Yes, HPE and Azure are dating, but it's OK if we see other people – Hilf

The article is correct. We have employees taking AWS and Azure classes right now. I'm not sure if there are any vCloud Air classes but they are available online.

Dell-EMC deal difficulties: VMware and daddy postpone roadtrip

The Tax Man cometh

Don't forget the potential $9BILLION tax bill that could torpedo this whole thing. I haven't heard news that the issue has been resolved.

Frankly I can't see how this is a good deal for EMC investors. Tracking stocks have a shitty history and the share holders have no voting rights. Dell wants to have its cake, eat it, and stick the restaurant with the bill.

What the bleedin' Dell is this? IT giant mulls unit selloffs – report

I have a lot of friends at Dell Enterprise Services (Perot Systems) I hope they'll be OK.

EMC shareholders slap biz with class action suit

Lawyers need their cut

While I believe this deal is going to go through, it represents a really shitty deal for EMC stock holders. The tracking stock Dell is issuing on their VMware shares is a load of horseshit that is sucking value away from share holders. Who the fuck really wants a devalued tracking stock that has absolutely no voting rights.

Anyways, these class action suits usually just get lawyers a shit load of money from their billable hours. They really don't give a shit about stock holders either.

Defeated HP will put Helion cloud out of its misery in January 2016

I wonder how this will affect HP's commitment to Open Stack. Their Virtual Private Cloud offering was supposed to move to Open Stack but they still haven't and the most recent upgrades to VPC is still VMware based.

EMC chief Joe Tucci to score monster pay-day in Dell deal – analysts

That's nothing compared to the $70+Million Meg Whitman is getting after she breaks HP in two.

How do you solve a problem like Elliott? EMC's got 3 weeks to figure it out

I agree with Elliot that EMC should sell off it's VMware stock but it pisses me off that a minor stock holder has this sway when anyone can plainly see that they bought into the company just to suck cash out of it. Elliot is the epitome of a robber baron. They suck in all that money and produce jack shit.

I only hope that EMC ends up selling off their VMware stock and let's it become a fully independent company. I see no good coming out of other scenarios. If HP or another OEM gets their grubby mitts on VMware, it will only kill all other OEM support for the platform in the long term. I'm still trying to figure out why HP would want EMC for any reason other than to get a hold of VMware. I'm also trying to figure out how HP can make it happen since the soon to be split HPE will have a market cap of $24billion while VMware is $34billion. EMC itself has a market cap of $48billion.

Will everyone really agree to that big of a stock swap? Will Elliot really make the cash they hope to get if they did get EMC and HPE into a shotgun wedding? Meg Whitman has be incredibly gifted at destroying stockholder value over the last year. I'm speculating that Elliot would cash out immediately after any merger and then buy back in when Meg finally crashes the stock of the combined company so they can force another spin off.

Meanwhile Elliot keeps forcing Citrix's hand on the other side of the equation. Dell buying Citrix could force HPE to try and buy VMware.

Michigan sues HP after 'botched' $49m upgrade leaves US state in 1960s mainframe hell

Re: Rational

I'm not sure. Anything dealing with Michigan makes me think this started under EDS (now HP Enterprise Services) but the project itself is a mainframe upgrade. That sounds like something HP's server and technical services guys might do.

Either way, there are people that simply are not doing their damn job. I'm betting that is the case on both sides of this matter. Both HP and Michigan.

Insiders BAFFLED: HP split-up inexplicably NOT a disaster

Re: Rational

EDS was a profitable company when HP bought it. Part of the problem was that the CEO of EDS had cut the company a lot so that it wasn't investing into many of its existing clients. I've found many accounts that were in disarray because they didn't have the people to properly service the account.

IMO the biggest issue about the EDS acquisition is that Mark Hurd made little effort to integrate it into HP at large. They just tacked it on as HPES and left it to it's own devices. There was, and still is, a lot of overlap between HPES and other HP orgs like Technical Services.

To Meg's credit, she actually got HPES integrated into HP. The pay tracking systems were finally merged. The travel req system has been merged. Meg started the whole term of OneHP to get the BUs to work together. However there is still quite a bit of duplication around the company IMO.

A big part of the problem now, IMO, is that HPES leadership is pretty damn incompetent. They are much more process driven than revenue driven. I know several teams that have historically been revenue generating but they are now being used to support other organizations. In the past, they would add a margin to their work but now it is up to the team they are supporting to add that margin. However they don't have to and often they don't so they aren't raising costs for their customers. As a result, those formerly revenue generating teams are now viewed as an expense and they get more of the job cuts. Now they can't support anything. I got tired of being 150% billable I left.

Meg hasn't helped things by killing telecommuting. That is raising expenses and throwing moral into the toilet. IMO she did that just to get people to quit so they don't have to pay any folks anything when they are laid off.

After the split, I bet a lot of HPES leadership gets shown the door. I have no idea why Mike Nefkin's still has a job. ES has done nothing but decline under his management and a lack of leadership. The same is true for many under him. There is quite a bit of cronyism around ES. Meg should have started firing VPs last year but I think she wanted to avoid rocking the boat because of the split.

Also, Meg is going to get a crap ton of cash after the split. just sayin'

'How can HP have a dress code if I'm wearing this wacky hat?'

Re: We do have a global dress code....

I guess that must be else where in the US. We're all leaving our polos untucked in Texas. How else can we hid our pistols.. ;-)

HP slaps dress code on R&D geeks: Bin that T-shirt, put on this tie

People didn't bitch this much when Megatron started killing off telecommuting. How about all the layoffs? There are teams in HPES that are well beyond 100% billable and Meg keeps cutting. She bitches and bitches about expenses but she saddles the company with the increase OpEx of giving everyone a cubicle, monitors, docking stations, etc. She says it is to improve "collaboration" and to have an all hands on deck mentality. But after seeing the HPE real estate plan, everyone knows she is just trying to force people to quit so HPE doesn't have to pay any severance.