Hesh Wiener
Hesh Wiener is president of Technology News of America and the original publisher of The Four Hundred. His wit and insight into the computer business have been illuminating users and frustrating vendors--who probably also learned a thing or two despite themselves--for more than three decades. Guild Companies is thrilled to have him contribute a monthly column to this newsletter, a column that we have called Mad Dog 21/21 in his honor. For those of you wondering, 20 percent alcohol is the upper limit in many states for a beverage that can still be sold as wine. Mad Dog 20/20 was a popular wine that kissed this limit, and was intended for people who were serious about getting excellent bang for their buck out of a bottle of wine. Hesh is often one step over the line, and is often a mad dog, as that title often connotes people who are passionate and boisterous about what they are thinking and saying, and more times than not are coming from a slightly different angle than the rest of us.
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Mad Dog 21/21: Gun-bae, Google, And Thanks For All The Tuna
May 7, 2012 Hesh Wiener
In late April, Google started selling the Galaxy Nexus GSM mobile phone from its Play Store, the website that dispenses Android applications. The Nexus is a developers’ phone. When it first became officially available in the United States last November in a CDMA variation sold exclusively through Verizon it was aimed at app developers who wanted an Android 4 platform. But then Google realized that it had overlooked another market, and a very important one at that: web creators. Now Google and its manufacturing partner Samsung are scrambling to educate site builders about the promise of yakju and takju on
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Mad Dog 21/21: Drivers Of The Purple Sage
April 23, 2012 Hesh Wiener
In the old days, to print a document you had to have driver software on your computer that matched an attached or nearby printer. In offices with a diversity of computers and printers, this was a nightmare. New applications, new types of documents, new clients, or new printers meant finding new paths through the thicket of operating systems, networks, drivers, and page description languages. These days you can let your printer vendors deal with linkage. You can even consider tossing out those persnickety PCs and riding out on the new frontier where the mobile clients range.
Some of the inspiration
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Mad Dog 21/21: Not Weather, Nor Whether But When
April 9, 2012 Hesh Wiener
In 1974, a band of self-styled revolutionaries, the Weather Underground published Prairie Fire, a manifesto explaining why and how to replace the government of the United States. Not only didn’t this happen, but two of the principals, Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, have a couple kids and mundane jobs as college teachers. If they were out to change the world today, they’d be writing revolutionary apps, not manifestos, or composing essays praising or damning those apps. And just what are those transformational apps doing? Putting money where our mouths are: In our phones.
For the past few years, people
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Mad Dog 21/21: Mobile IBM Has Apps, But With Gaps
March 26, 2012 Hesh Wiener
In February, IBM bought Worklight, an outfit that has a multi-platform mobile applications development system used to build, deploy, and manage their mobile apps. IBM expects Worklight’s technology to help it sell mobile solutions to a market moving faster than a certain elephant has been dancing. IBM acted just in time. It desperately needs first class mobile apps to keep its Lotus division from getting crushed by competitors and to reinforce a number of its other division’s offerings, too. Big Blue’s big problem won’t be easy to solve. IBM’s current roster of mobile apps is good in an unforgiving
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Mad Dog 21/21: Kenya Hear Me Now
March 12, 2012 Hesh Wiener
How do you win a war no matter how it turns out? You sell weapons to all sides. That is what IBM is doing in Kenya, where Vodafone’s Safaricom runs the fabulous M-Pesa mobile payment system. M-Pesa’s transaction volume dwarfs that of Kenya’s banks, five of which have now hired IBM to help them get a piece of the action. Meanwhile, Bharti Airtel, also powered by IBM, has similar ambitions in mobile telephony and micropayment.
M-Pesa is an offspring of Islamic hawala funds transfer; this worries Interpol as it fascinates the Gates Foundation and cheers IBM.
Everyone in
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Mad Dog 21/21: Slim’s Simmering SIMs
February 27, 2012 Hesh Wiener
Carlos Slim Helú worth about $75 billion, might be the richest person in the world. One of many companies Slim and his children control is Mexico-based América Móvil, which spans the Western Hemisphere, serving more than 200 million mobile telephony customers. On Groundhog Day, Straight Talk, one of AM’s brands, aided by a cadre of phone unlockers and iPhone jailbreakers launched its assault on the USA’s cell phone business. For openers, it halved the cost of operating an iPhone. What will follow might do more than change carriers’ market shares. It could reshape the entire mobile client ecosystem.
This
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Mad Dog 21/21: The Codd Piece
February 13, 2012 Hesh Wiener
IBM used to boast that its mainframes and their DBMS packages manage most of the world’s business and government records. Maybe that’s still true. There are, however, other contenders for that distinction. One is Oracle. And then there’s the little DBMS that holds more data than DB2 and Oracle combined: SQLite. It will be installed in more than a half billion systems this year alone. Like DB2 and Oracle, SQLite is relational fruit of the tree planted by Ted Codd. It’s software as a component. It’s open source. It’s rock solid. And it’s turning computing on its
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Mad Dog 21/21: Angry Hurd
January 30, 2012 Hesh Wiener
Oracle sure has headaches. It is not selling enough software to please investors. It isn’t making its numbers in hardware, either. It is governed by a two-headed executive reporting to CEO Larry Ellison. One of the presidents, Mark Hurd, is trying to get beyond the airing of a lawyer’s demand letter that turned his private folly into public obloquy. As a result, loyal Larry Ellison is saddled with his distracting, maladroit prince when he sorely needs to be fully focused, playing at the top of his game.
All this unfolded in late December, beginning on the 20th when, after the
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Mad Dog 21/21: Jumping The Shark
January 16, 2012 Hesh Wiener
IBM just finished a banner year. It recorded the highest revenue in its history and impressive profit. But if you depend on IBM’s proprietary systems, the IBM i and the System z platforms, don’t let the headlines fool you. You (and IBM) have a strategic problem. When it comes to computer hardware, IBM jumped the shark years ago. Jumped the shark? When Fonzie jumped the shark, five years into Happy Days, it marked a zenith, an irreversible turning point although the show lasted another five years. IBM jumped the shark in 1981, as it introduced the PC.
In
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Mad Dog 21/21: The Maltese Logon
December 12, 2011 Hesh Wiener
If your apps all work through a web browser or are written in agnostic Java, relax. Don’t bother reading this. But if Windows grips some of your apps, as it does at most IBM i shops, there are things going on you had better watch. Until recently, Windows dominated client environments. Not anymore. ARM-based devices running iOS (the Apple operating system, not the IBM midrange one) or Android or BlackBerry OS outsell X86 machines running Windows. Windows on ARM won’t close the gap. Windows 9 might run mainly on cloud servers with island clients a second thought. When you say