Hesh Wiener
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Mad Dog 21/21: Cover Story
April 18, 2011 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreThis is a story about online retailing giant Amazon and its tactful handling of a product problem. The product in this story is the Kindle 3 e-book reader. Kindle is the emblematic delivery device for a growing range of goods and services, Amazon’s direct connection to somewhere between five and 10 million customers. So, when the latest Kindle began failing in mysterious ways, there was a lot more at risk than a batch of gadgets. At stake was Amazon’s relationship to some of its best customers; it has emerged stronger than ever. Let’s all learn a little from Amazon.
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Mad Dog 21/21: Boiling the Ocean
April 4, 2011 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreGeneral Electric, a company nearly twice the size of IBM, is in an Obamic situation, a position so deeply disappointing that it makes one’s heart break. Its Mark I nuclear reactors lie at the heart of a catastrophe in Japan. Its agility at tax avoidance has become a target of the New York Times, which trims its taxes the old fashioned way, by not making money. Meanwhile, GE’s chairman, Jeffrey Immelt, is trying to help run the USA. IBM is pointing out, with a straight face, that we need a smarter planet. Who would want a stupider
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Mad Dog 21/21: Tablet Vivant, Memories Mordant
March 14, 2011 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreHitachi, which once ate IBM‘s disk drive business, has regurgitated, selling its rotating storage operations to Western Digital. Meanwhile, outfits that track memory prices generally agree that DRAM has become a drug on the market. The only storage chips selling like hotcakes are the kind used to build flash memory devices. Even those current darlings of the electronics world may get whacked, pricewise, as the Korean kings of NAND segue to 30 nanometers. What’s going on here? It’s iPads on the client side and green blades on the server end of the wire, that’s what.
A century
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Mad Dog 21/21: Talking Toklas
February 28, 2011 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreHere is how the game show Jeopardy works. The presenter says that the answer is “9W.” The contestant must come up with the right question, “Do you spell your name with a V, Herr Wagner?” Here is another example: The answer is Linux. A winning response is, “What’s in the server?” or “What runs on the Watson server?” Jeopardy fans loved watching the computer win as it prepared to take away their jobs. And astute Power box users who bet their careers on IBM i or AIX formulated some special questions, such as “How much would we save if we
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Mad Dog 21/21: The Daily Nothing
February 14, 2011 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreThe ironically yclept News Corp, purveyor of Fox and fishwrapper, has launched the Daily Nothing, its news service for the iPad. Fox sells the Daily Nothing as a subscription app, but most of the feed is also available for free. The pregnant possibility of Apple‘s charming but dimwitted device becoming a game-changing outlet for intertainment will bring fresh hope to indomitable IBM i shops with crusty, trusty green screen applications. Unfortunately, the often augured mass resurgence of dumb terminals, like the reported rediscovery of Prester John‘s kingdom, never turns out to be true.
The technical limits
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Mad Dog 21/21: The So-Called Network
January 31, 2011 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreAt a kosher deli, a customer was surprised when the waiter, who was Chinese, took his order in Yiddish. On the way out, the diner asked the restaurant’s manager how they found this remarkable waiter. “Keep shtum,” the manager replied, sotto voce. “He thinks we’re teaching him English!”
IBM thinks it can persuade customers that Lotus offerings will make them part of the social networking phenomenon that has attracted more than 500 million users to Facebook and 200 million to Twitter, and that this will somehow be good for them. How pathetic. And how tone deaf!
With this kind
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Mad Dog 21/21: Something Wiki This Way Comes
January 17, 2011 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreIf Bradley Manning had become a quarterback like Peyton Manning or Eli Manning, Julian Assange might never have been accused of having a greater aversion to condoms than the Pope. Instead, Bradley Manning is in the brig, accused of pilfering classified material that ended up in the hands of Wikileaks, which one might want well washed before shaking. From Wikileaks, the fishy secrets ended up in the fish-wrappers produced by the New York Times, the Guardian, der Spiegel, and elsewhere. It’s all enough to make most any IT professional (even you) pay a little more attention
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Mad Dog 21/21: Sheets for Brains
December 13, 2010 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreIn January 2009, Salvatore DiMasi made it a hat trick. He became the third consecutive Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives to resign in the wake of a federal indictment. The feds said DiMasi, his accountant, and a couple of their buddies took bribes from Cognos to steer software and services deals its way. IBM had paid nearly $5 billion for Cognos a year earlier, and paid again, this time $17.5 million, when it refunded all the money paid by Massachusetts to Cognos.
IBM undoubtedly hopes it is better at business intelligence than it was at due diligence.
IBM
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Mad Dog 21/21: Wither Thou Ghost–That IBM-Fortinet Halloween Deal
November 8, 2010 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreIBM was about to buy security gadget maker Fortinet, said a Bloomberg news service story published as Halloween weekend began. By the time the weekend was over, so, too, was the hypothesized acquisition. Fortinet said there was no such deal. It’s kind of a shame, because IBM could have picked up a seasoned shenanigans expert, Hong Liang Lu, improving IBM’s potential for corporate mischief, which has not yet recovered from the loss of former Systems and Technology Group GM, Bob Moffat. But don’t give up on IBM yet.
Hewlett-Packard was able to bring Leo Apotheker to its helm
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Mad Dog 21/21: No Bounce in Big Blue’s Belly
November 1, 2010 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreIBM‘s most economical servers, the System x machines, have been booming for a year, bringing Big Blue a revenue boost of more than 30 percent. At the other end of IBM’s product range, multi-million dollar mainframes have enjoyed a 15 percent jump in sales. But in the center IBM is in trouble. Big Blue’s best efforts have failed to produce a turnaround. For the past six quarters, Power Systems server revenue has been down at least 10 percent and sometimes much more. You can’t tell by the company’s confident posture, but IBM is in crisis.
Maybe IBM’s troubles are