Hesh Wiener
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Mad Dog 21/21: When Price/Performance Outruns Elasticity
April 5, 2010 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreSince its inception, the computer business has given customers better value year after year. Customers have responded by buying computers even faster than price/performance has improved. Give more, get more is a nice idea, but in fact the story is not quite that simple. Computing is a harsh competitive environment, ruthlessly Darwinian. The industry has survived many ups and downs, but the same cannot be said of its vendors or architectures. IBM may find that its server business has survived the recession only to be mortally threatened by economic recovery.
IBM has announced a range of Power7 servers for the
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Mad Dog 21/21: The Teahad Pilot, the Sycophant Senator, and IBM
March 15, 2010 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreGerry Cullen watched the Piper Cherokee fly over his head and dive into a building where the Internal Revenue Service had offices. It was February 18, and Cullen was outside a Marie Callender’s where he had gone for breakfast. A pilot as well as a pie lover, Cullen knew the Cherokee was going full throttle. What he couldn’t tell is that the teahad pilot’s deadly journey may have begun nearly 25 years earlier, when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan helped change the Federal tax code in an effort to save IBM $60 million while squeezing freelance computer programmers for a
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Mad Dog 21/21: It’s i or Die for Power in the Midrange
March 1, 2010 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreIntel has a very strong server chip lineup. Its current Xeon line, dubbed Nehalem, will soon give way to two newer product lines, Westmere-EP and Nehalem-EX. Where performance counts more than anything, Power still trumps X64. But where economy is foremost, X64 usually wins. With its new chips, Intel is ready to take on Power in the midrange. IBM’s server business cannot live on mainframe-class machines alone. Consequently, IBM may be about to lose its grip on servers to systems built to shared standards, much the way it lost its power in PCs.
Advanced Micro Devices will also get its
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Mad Dog 21/21: The Lotus Reposition
February 15, 2010 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreOne of the products that helps drive i/OS users forward is the Lotus Domino family of communications servers. IBM has been rolling out quite few new or enriched features lately, and argues that the new technologies, which cost more, pay their way by improving productivity. But there’s catch: IBM’s most advanced Domino features can require new operating systems. Basically, the latest Lotus announcement can mean that your operating system, which could have run any version of Domino a year ago might not support the Domino you want a year from now.
If your system runs OS/400 V5R3, which is pretty
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Mad Dog 21/21: One-Trick Pony, But What a Trick!
February 1, 2010 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreMicrosoft‘s net income during its second fiscal quarter, the calendar’s fourth, was up by a stunning 60 percent. The company’s revelation showed net income of $6.66 billion on sales of $19.02 billion; a third of Microsoft’s intake went to the bottom line. By way of comparison, IBM earned $4.81 billion, or 17.7 percent of its $27.23 billion in revenue, nearly half of it from software that accounted for a quarter of Big Blue’s intake. Microsoft’s success was even more concentrated. A third of its revenue and five-eighths of its profit came from Windows for PCs.
The good news is
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Mad Dog 21/21: Orwell’s Flat
January 18, 2010 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreLast week, speaking at Chatham House in London, IBM‘s chairman Sam Palmisano urged his audience to build what he calls a “smarter planet” right now. This will be quite a job, so big that when IBM published its official version of the Chatham House transcript of Palmisano’s presentation, the corporation called its document Welcome to the Decade of Smart. In his talk, Palmisano welcomed the wired up Internet of Things, but noted that a wired world has its risks, too.
He bravely mentioned George Orwell‘s flat.
The apartment where Orwell lived while writing 1984 in the Islington
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Mad Dog 21/21: If Trees Were Free, Would the Press Be?
January 4, 2010 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreCities that once had several newspapers now have just one, if any. Even the strongest of those remaining seem to be in grave danger. Their plight was a key theme of The Press a 1961 collection of A. J. Liebling’s essays from the New Yorker. Liebling’s love of newspapers was recalled by his widow, Jean Stafford, in 1975 as she introduced a third edition of the classic. Stafford is long gone, too, but Liebling’s “wayward concubine” is still with us amid its lingering death. For the press, the future, if any, depends on American Internet policy.
Liebling’s The Press
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Mad Dog 21/21: The Fox in IBM’s Storage Henhouse
November 30, 2009 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreMoshe Yanai became successful by taking enterprise storage business away from IBM. He led the team that created the EMC Symmetrix, which became the leading storage product at IBM’s glass house accounts. EMC and Yanai parted ways in 2001 and after a decent interval Yanai founded a new storage venture, XIV (pronounced Ex Eye Vee). IBM acquired XIV at the start of 2008, naming Yanai an IBM Fellow. Yanai may be able to clobber EMC for IBM, but to succeed he will also have to kill off IBM’s flagship DS8000 array with his XIV boxes.
The reason XIV
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Mad Dog 21/21: Can Mashups Save the Advanced Economies?
November 2, 2009 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreIBM wants to be your mashup company. Of course, it helps if you know what IBM means by mashup. It also helps if you prefer to pay for development and testing services sold by Amazon. Try not to let the free starter services offered by Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft’s Bing distract you. IBM might be onto something good. And if you have to pay a little extra, well, what’s new about that? But I’m getting ahead of the story. So, let’s start at the end.
Mashup is the current term of endearment for a Web site that
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Mad Dog 21/21: Oy, Cloudy Us!
October 19, 2009 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreEnterprising folk whose livelihood is derived from the applications of hydroponics technology to cannabis farming will find some excellent clues to opportunity in the October 10 New York Times or right on IBM’s own Website. In both places, IBM makes its pitch for what it calls smart cities. One featured burg is Dubuque, Iowa, where electronic gadgets will soon replace all the municipal employees who read power and water meters. Jump those meters and nobody’s going to stumble onto your skunk farm.
IBM calls this brainstorm Smart Cities, and does it so deftly that even a good reporter who