Hesh Wiener
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Mad Dog 21/21: Curate’s Eggs
January 20, 2014 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreBring Your Own Device is turning business computing inside out. Corporate support squads are now obliged to cope with free range users’ diverse machines. Gadgets running iOS, Android, Fire OS, and Chrome can give support personnel acute headaches, but they aren’t the most nefarious ones. The worst annoyances come from weakly managed Windows, which becomes infested by browser cooties like the Ask Toolbar, smuggled in during Java updates, or the McAfee Siteadvisor, subversively installed when Flash is patched. In the BYOD looking glass world, Windows can be less practical than any of the mobile operating systems.
A key
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Mad Dog 21/21: Pilots Of The Carob Bean
December 9, 2013 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreSince biblical times, Mediterranean people have cultivated the carob tree. Its seeds, called carats, are remarkably consistent in mass, about 200 milligrams each. For ages, the carat weight has been a measure of gemstones and other valuable items. The Roman pure gold solidus coin weighed 24 carats; it was the original 24-carat gold. Mobile device displays may soon be described in carats along with pixels and inches. This is because Apple is getting into the sapphire sheet business.
It might make a monkey of Corning’s Gorilla Glass, because wherever Apple leads, the rest of the technology world usually
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Mad Dog 21/21: The Gerstner Comparison
November 11, 2013 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreIBM has vowed to boost pre-tax earnings per share above $20 in 2015, a big jump from last year’s $15.25. It expects it will hit this target even though its revenue may be 4 percent lower in 2013 than in 2012 and 6 or 7 percent below that of 2011. Basically, IBM believes it can continue to improve the quality of its results even if it fails to boost profit quantity by keeping downward pressure on costs, upward pressure on margins, eluding competition and repurchasing shares to shave its EPS denominator.
IBM has done all of this for two decades,
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Mad Dog 21/21: Nice Clients, Shame About The Servers
October 28, 2013 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreReporting quarterly results, Microsoft said business customers are buying tons of software, more than offsetting a slump among consumers who prefer tablets to PCs. That’s a mixed picture, but a cheerful story compared to that of IBM. Big Blue’s best-selling computers are Linux engines for mainframes. Power server revenue is down 38 percent at a time when, paradoxically, the market is offering IBM a superb opportunity: There are TN5250 and TN3270 apps for the newest tablets and smartphones, even models still in the pipeline. Yet IBM is moping when it should be throwing a Bring Your Own Green Screen
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Mad Dog 21/21: Watson, Come Here, I Want To See You
October 14, 2013 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreVerizon is an $80 billion business growing that will grow to $85 billion, maybe more, next year. That makes it (in revenue) about 75 percent the size of IBM, 77 percent the size of Hewlett-Packard, twice the size of Google, half the size of Apple, a little bigger than Microsoft and about 25 percent larger than Amazon. So when Verizon says it wants to be a major player in computer services, its competitors have to pay attention.
So, too, must present and prospective customers, because Verizon doesn’t only want to be bigger. It wants to
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Mad Dog 21/21: I Think We’re All Bezos On This Bus
September 30, 2013 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreDuring the next two years, IBM hopes to boost its cloud computing revenues to $7 billion. About $4 billion would come from existing operations, in part a consequence of reclassifying activities. The remaining $3 billion would be new, mainly from acquisitions. IBM’s key cloud rivals, Microsoft, Google and notably Amazon, provide everything from client devices to apps to platforms. IBM falls short; its cloud has vast gaps. Consequently, whenever IBM’s customers or IBM’s own personnel, even CEO Ginni Rometty, go mobile, they are obliged to use other vendors’ equipment and services.
When it comes to gappy cloud offerings,
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Mad Dog 21/21: For Blue It’s Difficult, For Meme It’s Easy
September 16, 2013 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreThomas J. Watson started using the slogan “Think” while he was still at National Cash Register. He took it with him to CTR, which became IBM. It’s still part of IBM lore. “Think” has outlasted the typewriter, once a ubiquitous desktop symbol of IBM. “Think” is a meme, an intellectual artifact broadcast by cultural intercourse. IBM’s meme opened minds and doors to computing. Today, a different meme is the harbinger of technological progress in the white-collar workplace. It is the Staples slogan, “That was easy,” and its corporate curio kin, a red button that says “Easy.”
For more than
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Mad Dog 21/21: Defenestration
August 12, 2013 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreIn the 9th century BC, in northern Israel, Princess Jezebel, Phoenician wife of Hebrew King Ahab, was thrown from a window to her death by political opponents; her body was left to be eaten by dogs. In the 15th and 17th centuries, in Prague, government officials were flung from windows by their adversaries; the incidents, by now called defenestrations, each started a war. In the 21st century, all over the world, Windows clients are getting tossed out by end users; this is a disruptive and disconcerting trend to some, but ordinary, welcome progress to others.
This year, according
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Mad Dog 21/21: Drones With Phones
July 15, 2013 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreCisco TelePresence is a software system that gives functionality and character to a robotic rolling plastic column dubbed Ava 500. Ava, ambulatory hardware from iRobot, is five and a half feet tall. It is packed with media transponders and features a display showing a remote operator’s head. Ava has plenty of company these days. Some roving devices bring doctors to distant patients.
And back in computing country, both IBM and EMC are testing machines that patrol data centers. If this catches on, you might get a glass house robot yourself, or be replaced by one.
Cisco-iRobot Ava 500:
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Mad Dog 21/21: What Hath Got Broth?
June 24, 2013 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreTowards the end of May, Arvind Mahankali, a very smart kid from Long Island, won the National Spelling Bee. His winning word was knaidel. Knaidel is the Yiddish-American term for matzoh ball, variously spelled as matza ball, matzah ball or matzo ball. The top speller was the sixth consecutive desi to cop the prize; soon the winning word might be dacoit. Meanwhile, IBM, with its center of IQ mass in South Asia, can contemplate how it should spell out cloud computing . . . and the possibility that its services empire is the wrong kind