Blog Profile / At Your Servers

Steve Jobs In The Wilderness

I cannot say this of anyone else: Without Steve Jobs, much of the modern world would be unimaginable. Bill Gates or Steven Spielberg may have touched one or two areas more deeply, but no one had Jobs’ impact over such a range. Personal computers, the renaissance of animation, portable music, mobility, tablets – those are [...]

IBM’s Continent Building in Africa

Make no mistake: IBM wants to make a buck – heck, many many bucks – in Africa. How IBM makes that money, from infrastructure spending to software developer relations, may affect the continent and its people more than any outside government, or any charity’s funds. It has already affected one African very deeply. Tony Mwai [...]

Steve Jobs’ Two-Minute Lesson

If you’ve been reporting in the Valley long enough, you probably have a Steve Jobs story. Here’s mine, tiny enough, but maybe telling. In 1996 I was covering spot news from a closet in The Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau when the phone rang. It was Jobs, offering to comment on Pixar’s earnings. It [...]

At Procter & Gamble, Toothpaste Is Data

HP: The Case For Incoherence

You don’t see this much bad news in one place very often. Hewlett Packard chief executive Leo Apotheker just laid it out: The Palm OS is a flop and will be killed; the personal computer business needs independence, a sale or arms-length operation, if it is to continue; the cash cow of printers won’t be [...]

Who’s Got A Dell (Issue)?

  Dell is getting rabbit punched in the aftermarket, with the stock off 7% on projections of lower revenues and higher operating expenses. The company says it is a price is paying for transiting from lower-margin mass businesses, while it heads to a glorious future of high-value unified data center architectures and swift, insightful data [...]

Google Buys Motorola For Patent Parts

Google chief executive Larry Page says he wants to “supercharge the Android (mobile communications) ecosystem,” so he’s buying Motorola Mobility, the core of the old Motorola, reportedly for $12.5 billion. You can view it as a milestone in American business history, but more important, it is the latest turn in this year’s war among Google, [...]

“The Next Cisco’s” Earnings Challenge

Cisco Systems had a welcome quarter, but even sunny chief executive John Chambers will not say the company has its groove back. In fact, he may not want any “back” at all – the way he sees it, the old Cisco doesn’t work for the new world. Cisco earned $1.2 billion, or 22 cents a [...]

At Procter & Gamble, Toothpaste Is Data

Every Monday Procter & Gamble’s leadership gathers around an oval table on the sixth floor of the company’s Cincinnati, Ohio headquarters. The room is lined by two enormous and curved screens. This is the soapmaker’s “Business Sphere” and, like a philosopher’s stone, it provides a view into the 4 billion times each day that P&G [...]

Huawei’s Security Attack

The politics of arming the Internet just went up a notch. Huawei Technologies, a Chinese maker of networking gear, yesterday announced that John Suffolk, former Chief Information Officer of the U.K. government, would be the company’s Global Cyber Security Officer. Suffolk has also been Director General of the UK Criminal Justice Transformation Program, and an advisor [...]

South Dakota, Internet Learning Pioneer

Technology transformations happen where you’d least expect them – for reasons you may not like. This week I was in South Dakota for an archery tournament, and got schooled in an Internet revolution. According to the Sioux Falls Argus, this fall the rural town of Bonesteel will teach high school biology, physics and physical science [...]

Pepsico’s Social Media Transformation

What kind of assumptions should a traditional consumer products company make about how much social media will change its business? At Pepsico, the assumption is that social media will change pretty much everything. The trick is to figure out how that will happen, and find cost-efficient ways to learn what is valuable. “Long term, every [...]

SAP’s HANA — A Billion Euro Pipeline By Next Year

German software giant SAP just closed a strong second quarter, with revenues of 3.3 billion Euros, up 14% from a year earlier, and profits of 857 million Euros, up 11%. The company also projects annual revenues at the high end of previous forecasts. Co-chief executive Bill McDermott sees more on the way, thanks less to [...]

Apple’s Shock To Corporate Computing

The verdict is in with Apple’s blowout earnings: Corporate America, you are not ready for how fast the office will change. It is turning into a consumer space, and that is going to affect most of the long-held relationships with the big hardware suppliers, software makers, and consultants in a big chunk of this $1 [...]

Google’s Innovation -And Everyone’s?

Should we look to Google (the company, not the search engine) for lessons on economic growth and employment? Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, and until last April Google’s chief executive, thinks what he’s got goes way beyond Google’s campus. “Google proved that you could systematize innovation,” he told me recently, adding  that this meant you [...]

Google’s Next Triumph

Google didn’t just earn more today. It earned better. Way better. Here is the release. Google’s revenues for the quater ended June 30 were $9.03 billion, up 32% from $6.82 billion in the second quarter of 2010. Now look at the per-employee numbers: Google grew its employee base 9%, from 26,316 employees at the end [...]

Biz Tech’s New Big Alliances

Even the biggest players in the world’s $3.6 trillion information technology industry thrive through allies and partnerships. And as Internet-based cloud computing – the ability to access lots of data and processing power from anywhere — takes over more of the business, those alliances are changing fast. “We can no longer rely on our traditional [...]

VMWare’s Product/Pricing Assault On Microsoft

VMWare just released its biggest, most comprehensive array of software, with an ultimate aim of creating fully automated supercomputing systems that can handle mammoth amounts of complexity, work securely with all sorts of work and consumer phones, tablets, and whatnot…and put many of its big competitors on the spot. Details on the offering here. Most [...]

Big Data’s People-Changing Machine

The Allosphere is a tool for new ways of seeing enormous amounts of data – and quite possibly, ourselves. The machine is egg-shaped, three stories tall, and located on the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Scientists stand on a catwalk that runs through its middle, and wearing 3D glasses look at enormous [...]

Google+ And The Master Plan

This was an enormous week for Google, and everyone who watches them. Just thinking about Google+, Google’s (re)entry into social media, is not thinking big enough. What we saw this week was the first big move of Google in the Larry Page era, bringing forth the first changes and efficiencies he seems to have been [...]