Here is my first of two prediction columns for 2014. There’s just too much for it all to fit in one column. My neighbor and good friend Avram Miller wrote a predictions column this year that’s quite good and you might want to read it before this one. We discuss some of the same things though of course Avram and I occasionally agree to disagree.
This column is mainly about business predictions for 2014 while the follow-up column will be more about products and technologies.
#1 — Microsoft gets worse before it gets better. Ford CEO Alan Mulally, who already owns a home in Seattle, announced just today that he is staying with Ford through 2014 and absolutely positively won’t be the next CEO of Microsoft. This firm statement is in contrast with his kinda-sorta firm denials before today. What this means to me is that Mulally was in hard discussions about the Microsoft job but walked away from the deal. Since there’s a clock ticking on Ballmer’s retirement someone will get the position but that someone will now probably be an insider, possibly Stephen Elop.
This is terrible news for everyone, even for the people who made it inevitable — Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates. Mulally would have taken the job had Ballmer and Gates resigned from the Microsoft board. They wouldn’t and so he didn’t, the result being more palace intrigue and behind-the-scenes micromanaging not to good effect. Whoever gets the top job won’t have the power to do what’s needed and probably won’t have the job for long.
Microsoft’s future lies in the enterprise and the quicker they get out of consumer products the better for the company, but a weak CEO won’t be able to move fast enough.
We’ll revisit this one next year when Mulally may again be on the short list.
#2 — IBM throws in the towel. Any minute some bean counter at IBM is going to figure out that it is statistically impossible for the company to reach its stated earnings-per-share goal of $20 for 2015. Cutting costs, buying revenue, repurchasing shares and short-changing both customers and employees no longer adds-up to enough financial power to get the job done. This will lead to a management crisis at Big Blue. On top of that throw half a dozen customer lawsuits over bungled projects and it doesn’t look good for the regime of Ginni Rometty.
Can she pivot? That’s the question. Rometty has been trying to follow her predecessor Sam Palmisano’s playbook but it isn’t working. She needs a new strategy. This is actually a great opportunity for both Rometty and IBM, but the second half of this prediction is they’ll blow it. Rometty and IBM will survive 2014 but it won’t be pretty.
#3 — Blackberry to Microsoft. Assuming Elop gets the top job at Microsoft (not at all a shoo-in) he’ll approach the enterprise play from a mobile angle and that means buying Blackberry. Microsoft will get enough patents from the deal to further enhance its revenue position in the Android market (you know Microsoft gets royalties from Android phones, right?). Redmond will get a great R&D facility in Waterloo and thousands of super-smart employees. I think this will happen, Elop or not. The only alternative purchasers are Intel and Qualcomm and I don’t see them doing it.
#4 — Intel does ARM, kinda. The idea that Intel would go back to building ARM processors is supposed to be a big deal but I don’t see it happening without some external push. Remember Intel has been down this route before, eventually selling its StrongARM operation to Marvell. What’s key here is that Apple needs to dump Samsung so they’ll force Intel to fab their A-series processors by threatening to stop buying desktop and notebook CPUs. It’s not as big a deal as it sounds except that Samsung will be losing its largest customer.
#5 — Samsung peaks. With Apple gone and Samsung phone margins eroding, what’s the company to do? 4K TVs aren’t it. Samsung needs to actually invent something and I don’t see that happening, at least not in 2014.
#6 — Facebook transforms itself (or tries to) with a huge acquisition. I wrote long ago that we’d never see Facebook in the Dow 30 Industrials. The company is awash in users and profits but they’ve lost the pulse of the market if they ever had it. Trying to buy their way into the Millennial melting data market Facebook offered $3 billion for Snapchat, which turned them down then rejected a $4 billion offer from Google. Google actually calculates these things, Facebook does not, so where Google will now reverse-engineer Snapchat, Facebook will panic and go back with the BIG checkbook — $10+ billion. If not Snapchat then some other overnight success. Facebook needs to borrow a cup of sugar somewhere.
#7 — Cable TV is just fine, thank you. Avram thinks cable TV will go all-IP. This is inevitable and in fact I wrote about it the first time at least eight years ago. Cable companies already make all their profit from Internet service so why do anything else? But not this year. That’s one for 2016. For the moment cable advertising is in resurgence and these guys aren’t going to make any significant changes while they are still making money. Look for more cable industry consolidation but nothing revolutionary… yet.
#8 — The Netflix effect continues, this time with pinkies raised. Hollywood is for sale. Nothing new there: Hollywood has always been for sale. Remember when it was Sony buying Columbia Pictures that was supposed to change entertainment forever? How did that work out? Now it’s Netflix blazing a new trail for content creation that threatens the old models except it doesn’t. Netflix knows from its viewer logs who likes what and can therefore make original programming that’s reliably popular. Amazon, in contrast, asks its users what they like and hasn’t been nearly as successful as Netflix at original content. Amazon will learn in time (they always do) but one of the things they’ll be learning is that people lie about what they like, though not about what they watch. Hollywood already knew that. Amazon doesn’t need to buy Netflix to learn this lesson, so I seriously doubt that Netflix is going to be in play. But Hollywood itself will very much be in play… in 2016.
#9 What cloud? The cloud disappears. My old friend Al Mandel once told me “The step after ubiquity is invisibility.” This means that once everyone has something it becomes a given and gains commodity status along with dramatically lowered profit margins. In the 240 suggested predictions I saw over the last few days from readers almost nobody used the word cloud. It has effectively become invisible. Every IT startup from here on will rely strongly on the cloud but it won’t be a big deal. Commoditization will have cloud providers competing mainly on price. This means there are unlikely to be any significant new entrants to this space. The cloud opportunity, such as it was, has come and gone.
#10 Smart cards finally find their place in America. I covered smart cards in Electric Money, my PBS series from 2001, yet they still aren’t popular in the USA. Smart cards, if you don’t know it, are credit or debit cards with embedded RFID chips that impart greater security though at a cost. They’ve been popular in Europe for 15 years but American banks are too cheap to use them.. or were. The Target data breach and others will finally change that in 2014 as the enterprise cost of insecurity becomes just too high even for banks Too Big to Fail.
Look for 10 or so more product predictions tomorrow.
#10.- The bitcoin protocol makes smart cards/credit cards/wire transfers/western union obsolete. I know you hate BTC, but it is the protocol that will win.
Jason Rex – Greshams’s Law – “Bad money drives out good”. Anyone can duplicate BitCoin, endlessly. It will have zero value before the end of this year.
Bitcoin will gain wide acceptance in countries with capital controls in place (Cyprus, Argentina, Iceland, etc).
Don, I am making a distinction between bitcoin the protocol and BTC the coin. It is the idea, the protocol, that is revolutionary. The value of the coin may go up or down, it does not matter, what matters is the implementation of a frictionless payment system. Anyhow, time will tell, but I think this year it will gain world wide acceptance.
coingen
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Bitcoin is going nowhere. No one accepts Bitcoin. You may say “There are entire sites that take Bitcoin”, but you’re wrong. They price there stuff in dollars and convert the price into Bitcoin. Then, they try to get rid of their Bitcoins as soon as possible.
Bitcoin’s biggest problem is that it needs miners to actually work, but mining is becoming so expensive that miners are leaving. Fewer miners mean someone will have a chance to act malicious and take over Bitcoin. And, considering the type of people who mine Bitcoins, this will happen.
If I put my money in a non-government back currency, it’ll be Canadian Tire Money.
Not so far fetched… Years ago we vacationed at Negril in Jamaica. We visited an artisan’s shop in the local town. The proprietor accepted Canadian Tire money. He sent it to his brother in Toronto who bought tools and shipped them to Jamaica.
Thank you for educating me about Canadian Tire money!
The bitcoin protocol foresaw what you said. If mining becomes too difficult and there are fewer miners (it takes too long to mine), then mining becomes easier. In this way, it’s a self-regulating protocol. As more people mine, it becomes more difficult. If fewer people mine, it becomes easier.
It’s smart. 🙂
Bitcoin is too volatile to be a serious currency. It needs something that stabilizes the exchange rate before it can replace government backed currencies.
Bitcoin is not likely to ever replace a country’s national currency. It will run side by side with it, though.
Exchange rates will stabilize as more and more businesses start to accept bitcoin. It will take a long time, though. (At least a few years.)
Amazon will buy Blackberry. They need an “in” in the handset market and their platform is far enough from Google’s Android.
Why would they want “different from Android”, or for that matter need an “in” in the handset market, when they’ve shipped all these Kindle devices direct and have Android systems expertise in-house? If they wanted to enter the handset market, they would just do it, just like Google and just like their Kindle. What advantage does platform diversity have here, aside from a few hard-core adherents? And what in blazes would Amazon want with shelf space when they’d rather the retail storefront didn’t even exist?
Two motives that do make sense to me relate to Android: to port the BB line over to Android + whatever secret sauce is in the BB app suite, or more likely to get an “in” in the Rockstar Consortium patent pool. The third somewhat sensible motive, that they want AWS to service BlackBerry handsets, seems like a lot of trouble for what they’d get for it.
Jeff Bezos, being this generation’s Jack Tramiel, might be personally interested for the right price — if nothing else, to have ears in Washington as well as a mouth. I can’t see that a buy would do anything for *Amazon* per se.
The reason Amazon would buy Blackberry is for Enterprise Cred, so that large corporations and govt organizations would trust their gear.
I disagree with this thinking, since I don’t believe Enterprise users fit their model of “devices that funnel users toward shopping and ads” since the Enterprise users don’t make the purchasing choices at an org level and the corporate and govt IT depts don’t want to yield as much control as Amazon wants to keep. (“You deleted WHAT from my Fire?!?”)
I predict that 2014 will be the year that the Bitcoin bubble finally bursts.
The difference between Bitcoin and conventional currencies is that conventional currencies are ultimately backed by the taxpayers and economy of a nation. Currencies only lose value when there is a fear that a nation will renege on its debts.
However, Bitcoin is backed by nothing. It’s not a currency, it’s a speculative commodity with zero inherent value. So the trading value can fluctuate wildly. All it needs is for the value to fluctuate sharply downwards for any reason and to trigger a wave of selling, for the selling to get out of control and the whole house of cards to come crashing down.
I predict that by the end of the year wampum and tulip bulbs will have a higher value than bitcoins.
” is that conventional currencies are ultimately backed by the taxpayers and economy of a nation”
I’m not an expert on currencies, but I can’t see why that is the case. Would you care to explain that?
Regarding other bitcoin comments, I think it is specifically set up so that you can’t duplicate a bitcoin. Maybe you could duplicate the currency by setting up another bitcoin currency (with different mining params) but I can’t see how that could kill bitcoin.
And it doesn’t need miners to keep working. Why would it need that? In fact it is set up so that mining eventually stops.
I’m not a fan of bitcoin, nor knowledgeable of it, but it seems like a lot of criticisms are based even less knowledge and the assumption it is some simple electronic currency. The protocol and whole process has been well thought out and engineered by some every clever (unknown) people to be safe and work properly. In fact not just ‘very clever’ but genuinely clever.
If bitcoin becomes economically significant it will soon cease to have many of its desirable attributes (it will be monitored, taxed, etc.) and possibly gain new negative attributes (e.g. all the worst qualities of the Gold Standard, hackability, etc.) And there’s always the possibility that BTC was created by the NSA or someone similar.
Currencies are backed by the productive output of a nation state. A nation’s GDP, millitary, government stability, among a host of other items all contribute to the stated “value” of a currenc. The currency not only exists as a medium of exchange but also as a way for a nation state’s government to collect taxes to fund projects. This ability to pay taxes in that currency effectively gives that currency unit legitamcy. Bitcoin is a lot like gold or other commodities. You can pay for things in gold, but it is much more difficult and you certainly can’t pay your taxes in gold.
Hoo boy. Microsoft buys Blackberry? And then tries to combine legacy BBOS and Windows Phone? Any sane engineer would RUN from that. I still think a Chinese firm will make a bid and it will be hard offer to refuse.
Intel will do ARM, heck they’ve said they’ll fab for anyone given their capacity and lack of x86 demand, but it’s not a done deal with Apple. GlobalFoundries will also make a play for Apple’s business and Apple could wind up using both them and Intel, to keep playing one off against the other and beat them up on price.
Facebook will keep acquiring, but will they keep their Hollywood-like way of buying what’s hot today? Or will Facebook look for pieces to put together something new or even incremental? I think the hot social media fad is flaming out and don’t see them writing big checks in 2014.
I agree Samsung is in trouble with smartphone growth flattening, but that really hurts Google more. Google and Android would not be in such a predominant position if Samsung had not spent big bucks marketing it all over the world. If Samsung falls, that will indirectly hurt Google, while also helping Apple and perhaps Microsoft/Nokia most of all. That also would make 2014 a better year for Microsoft, than worse.
Smart cards require smart readers and the credit card industry only marketed those to transaction time sensitive merchants, like convenience stores and fast foot restaurants. Check out your local coffee shop, grocery store, department store and you won’t find the readers smart cards need. Nuh uh, 2014 will still be dumb magstripes.
Very enjoyable to mull over these thoughts about the coming year! Looking forward to living in it too.
H-P tried it with WebOS and Windows. Never got off the ground… too bad if you ask me
Will Samsung fall? I don’t see it.
Yes, Apple will migrate its business away from them as soon as it can – but it will be a long time before Apple can rely on Intel and the likes of GlobalFoundries for the sorts of volumes and reliability they need.
Even so, Samsung are still dominating the Android space. It’s a messy, scattergun approach – iterating wildly, leaving many product lines for dead – but having fingers in so many pies makes sense of their staggering marketing budget (and remember much of that budget is for “incentives” to push Samsung devices in stores).
All we are seeing is that the opportunities for huge year-on-year growth for companies like Apple and Samsung are harder and harder to find. That should be no surprise, but stock market analysts seem to be astonished every time – and are biased towards the short-term profits of punting small companies rather than allowing large ones to invest for the long term.
Put it this way – who would you rather bet on: Samsung or LG?
“Netflix knows from its viewer logs who likes what and can therefore make original programming that’s reliably popular.” Amazon also knows from the Lovefilm viewer logs who likes what… OK, it may not have quite the same subscriber base as Netflix. But Amazon also knows who buys what.
#4 rings fairly true. I think Apple will move away from Samsung and it will take a huge chunk of $$ with it.
Samsung, without being able to see what Apple is doing, will have invent on its own and I doubt it can.
#1 – Agree with you again. Microsoft needs to abandon the consumer market and focus on Enterprise. They own the Email server/client market and have killed off a ton of companies with SharePoint.
#2 – I’m hearing rumors about IBM (just like everyone else) that lead me to believe they are abandoning hardware (server, storage). If so, it weakens their ‘seat at the IT table’ and gives HP and Dell legs up in combining (obfuscating pricing/costs) products to Corporate customers.
That was an interesting observation about Microsoft’s board. One would think a new CEO could meet with the board members on an individual basis and discuss his/her plans. One would hope the CEO would not be second guessed or ambushed at the board meetings. Microsoft will be changing leadership and needs to change their business plans. One would hope a good CEO with a well reasoned plan would be given the freedom to move on the plan without resistance. If this is not the case then maybe Microsoft needs to rework its board first.
Microsoft CEO – I’m British so I don’t know much about Alan Mulally, but I know enough to know he was never going to be the right person for Microsoft. Sure he’d keep it going in the same direction as Ballmer has, but that’s downward!
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For desktop they need to focus on the user experience; Windows 7 and 8 just aren’t good enough. Get that right and you’ll stem some of your losses to other OSs. Accept that the Surface is really a PC with detachable keyboard (one almost useable and one unusable!).
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Office I’m sure is still a big product for them, but here again is a challenge as now Apple give away their productive suite. Microsoft need to rethink their pricing on Office. They risk not being the standard any longer.
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Enterprise isn’t something that I know enough about.
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However, Microsoft need some excitement about them! Xbox used to provide that, but they seriously dropped the ball on that one. Now they need a CEO who you’d imagine you could play Halo or Forza against. Because Microsoft doesn’t need a CEO who’ll keep the house tidy, but rather one who’ll not be afraid to make a mess while doing something spectacular. Perhaps giving birth to that Black Swan.
Microsoft would need excitement if they were competing in the consumer market place. But they are not, at least not effectively. However they are competing well in the Enterprise space. For that, stodginess is actually a good attribute. While the folks at work enjoy gaming, even the managers, they don’t spend company money on it. They do spend significant amounts of company money on Exchange and SharePoint. I agree with Bob, Microsoft needs to become another GE, and business is where they need to concentrate their business.
“For that, stodginess is actually a good attribute.” I find it interesting that stodginess is good when it comes to something people know well enough to actually make money at it (their own business), but when it comes to things that cost money (everything else) they look for excitement. Wouldn’t you think people would be more consistent in their behavior? Or at least recognize that stodginess is a virtue even when seeking excitement?
#1 Microsoft CEO. I’ve thought for a while that Elop would become the next CEO but I don’t think he’ll resign. He hasn’t minded Ballmer and Gates being above him up until now so why would he start to object after he becomes CEO? It will be a big promotion for sure, with Ballmer and Gates still above him just like before. I can see why Mulally wouldn’t want the job but I can’t see why Elop would complain about it.
1. Elop would be just about the worst thing that could happen to Microsoft, short of Ballmer staying. With Mullaly out, I think they need to look at the Skype Team. They need a software developer in charge, not a marketing prick. I refer you to Apple under Sculley.
2. IBM has been a mess for a very long time. When they started getting away from making things, they lost their way. They can’t outsource the Z-series, which is just about the brightest spot in the company. Time to divest some business units on a major scale.
3. Should have done it long ago. HP would benefit more from it if they are serious about getting back into the smartphone business, but Microsoft having the patents and including them in the Windows Phone license would be a big shot in the arm.
4. Intel already does ARM through the back door. They have too much excess capacity to not do FAB deals. They’re gonna be helping Micron with RAM again, too.
5. Asian companies don’t really invent anything, they imitate, enhance and extend. Samsung really is no different. The last truly innovative company in Asia is Sony. And that’s not saying much.
6. Facebook is sooo 2009.
7. Spot on when you said it in 2001. If our internet infrastructure wasn’t so far behind the implementation curve, we’d be there already, but then again, it took 10+ years just to agree to implement DTV.
8. Netflix has some great original content, but we need and want one place to get all of our network shows a la cart, including ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CW, HBO, Showtime, ITV, BBC, what have you. It’s coming, just not nearly soon enough. At least the cable premium channels are starting to see the benfit of unbundled subscriptions. It’s a start.
9. Cloud is nothing new, just a different marketing spin. Instead of outsourcing the people, you’re outsourcing the infrastructure. There are benefits and detriments, just a matter of finding the right balance, but if you deal with the public, you better make darn sure you have your security in place.
10. Smart Cards don’t have RFID chips, they basically have flash memory. Some have additional NFC capability, but that is more ubiquitous in Asia. My first Smart Credit Card was from the U.S. division of Barclay back in 2001. Remember the little smart chip readers they gave away? It didn’t catch on then, but it should have. We as consumers should demand chip-and-pin now. RFID/NFC isn’t catching on either, and I really don’t want to be left open to skimmers querying the cards in my wallet as I walk by.
The wallet-skimming concern is easily mitigated by using metallized card sleeves in your wallet. (Or you can just insert a piece of aluminum foil in the appropriate location, which is what I did at first,) I’ve used these sleeves for quite a while now, given that one of my credit cards has an RFID chip in it and has had for years.
Yeah, the smart card thing is odd. We’ve had chip’n’pin in Canada for a decade; trips into the US feel quaint every time I’m asked to sign a credit card slip. I keep expecting them to pull the old credit-card-slidey thing out from under the counter.
We do have the best banking sector in the world, and chip’n’pin is part of that. I’m not saying our banks are any damn good; I’m saying they’re better than yours.
How cute. Smack talk coming from Canada… aka, America’s 51st state.
Oh, but don’t you look so very grown up wearing your big-boy pants?
Dude, Dudley Dooright was based on a Canadian Mounty. He’s Canadian.
Well, in fairness, smart cards are old news in Canada, and Canada’s banking system survived 2008 in far better shape than the US’.
Note also that due to the US losing the War of 1812, Canada is not, at this time anyway, the US’ 51st state (recall Canada’s answer to the US’ request to join in the invasion of Iraq).
“#2 – I’m hearing rumors about IBM (just like everyone else) that lead me to believe they are abandoning hardware (server, storage). If so, it weakens their ‘seat at the IT table’ and gives HP and Dell legs up in combining (obfuscating pricing/costs) products to Corporate customers.”
“IBM has been a mess for a very long time. When they started getting away from making things, they lost their way. They can’t outsource the Z-series, which is just about the brightest spot in the company. Time to divest some business units on a major scale.”
IBM has been shopping its x86 server unit since late 2012. I am also expecting that they would off-load their SO ( outsourcing) group if they could find a buyer. As for HP and Dell, they are even worse off with little CREDIBLE presence in the enterprise software space and with companies moving towards whitebox/cloud infrastructures. I suspect we’ll see Blue continue to acquire as much S/W portfolio as they can.
How about a SAP/IBM merger?
I cant see IBM succeeding as a service only company, they aren’t that good (and in the last round of cuts saw 50 IBM-ers walk from a site overnight with no immediate replacements) and charge like wounded bulls. if you want a company that’s good and expensive (for services) go for Accenture or one of the Indian outsources (Infosys, HCL) if you want it cheaper.
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Agree, I worked in the IBM Services (SO) unit for over 25 years and watched the talent pool get slaughtered solely in the name of cost cutting and short term EPS. Now they struggle to deliver even simple data entry solutions. They are dead meat in services going forward – they will spend more time litigating with (former) customers suing their arses off for failed projects, just as Bob says.
SO would engage me, as a STG mainframe specialist, to assist them in keeping their customer interested in their SO mainframe contract. SO lacked any visionaries who could understand how the mainframe could be further exploited such as with Linux. It was depressing to see a group of non-technical project leaders types flounder around trying to save their contracts. Moreover SO was so short staffed they wanted STG to pony up resources to assist them without understanding that STG personnel were essentially not going to get paid for any involvement with SO. The bottom line was that SO was consistently losing their mainframe contracts.
#1. Microsoft seems adrift. I admire Mulally greatly, but they need more than just a new CEO.
#2. We may see IBM’s board revolt in 2014 (finally). Someone needs to be the adults in Armonk. It hasn’t been the executive leadership.
#3. BB to Microsoft would be a purely tactical move. If Redmond does this, they really have no strategy at all.
#4 and #5. Yes, Apple will dump Samsung (as the night follows day) I’m just not sure Apple wants another strong partner (Intel) who really doesn’t need Apple as much as Apple needs the partner.
#6. Facebook is so 2012. Facebook should friend MySpace and do lunch sometime.
#7. Only until consumers figure out that cable TV is like the land line they used to have for their phones.
#8. Netflix and Amazon prove Henry Ford’s adage: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they’d have said faster horses.”
#9. Cloud has passed the Peak of Inflated Expectations and is headed toward the Trough of Disillusionment.
#10. Chip ‘n PIN would be the way to go, but U.S. banks just can’t get themselves past the signature line. It’s a reminder that your signature on the card is meant to convey your agreement to pay your bill, not (primarily) to provide security.
BB to MS makes sense as a government favour as cant see Obama using a BB if its owned by China, add integration in Nokia phones/Windows Pro/RT desktops and add some patent trolling/licencing it could be a winner(ish)
It’s okay IBM – Ginni has just emailed everyone and the IBM Watson Group will save IBM (well she didn’t quite put it that way cause she’s at the helm of a steady ship in her large salary induced delusion). It’s a huge step apparently. I can just see the market going………..WTF.
Well if that’s the opening of 2014 for IBM, I think Bob may be right or even a little conservative on how bad things are going to be for the blue monkeys this year.
Its funny you should mention Target and smart cards in the same point. Did you know that Target Corporation was the first major retailer to do a mass roll-out of chip cards way back in 2001? They did this in conjunction with Visa USA and I was the Software Development Manager for the Australian-based firm that supplied the software (card applet, POS library, store server and central database components). The chip part was used purely for loyalty programs at that stage, but nevertheless, Visa USA held us to the highest standards when it came to security, all because we were storing the credit card number (no other information, just the number). I can remember spending days locked in a conference room in San Mateo defending the design and making changes based on input from several very smart people at Visa.
I guess over time a combination of complexity and other factors can lead to diminished security, but I still find it ironic that Target had this major breach recently considering the standards that they, the card issuers and the card associations were holding vendors to 12 years ago.
As an aside, I also remember we had to implement some hacks in our card applet and POS software because IBM screwed up the Java implementation on the chip cards. Bloody IBM…
Regarding signatures on credit transactions: they are being phased out in Australia this year, but I worry about non-repudiation. In the case of a dispute, a handwriting expert can always say with a high degree of certainty whether or not the signature is legitimate, whereas it is impossible to prove that you weren’t the one that typed the PIN.
Bob said “Avram thinks cable TV will go all-IP. This is inevitable and in fact I wrote about it the first time at least eight years ago.” I don’t understand the technological benefit of Internet TV. The current cable model is based on sending one high quality signal for a channel that hundreds of people can see simultaneously. The current internet model sends an individual stream to each customer on demand, requiring one hundred times the bandwidth of one customer for a hundred customers. I guess it depends on exactly what is meant by “all-IP”. By adding a local DVR to the current cable “broadcast” model, we achieve the benefit of video on demand with no additional bandwidth.
Cable systems are already using “on-demand”, presumably IP-based, for SDV, their solution for infrequently-watched channels.
As analog cable sunsets, it’s not far-fetched to think the cable boxes of the future will be designed only to receive a channel when the customer requests it, saving bandwidth, even with six tuner DVRs.
TV is not like an Internet webpage. A single TV program contains Gigabytes of data and is watched by millions of people. Sure sdv is used for channels rarely watched so there is no point reserving a channel space for them when no one is watching. Same applies to “on demand” re-runs. There are still dozens of prime-time shows being produced and watched by millions. The most efficient way to distribute them is to “broadcast” each one at a known time so that viewers will know when to watch or record. That’s not the current Internet model, but it is and will continue to be the cable TV model. Perhaps a future Internet model will allow for a one-to-many distribution model that involves scheduling. That’s the only sensible thing to do.
Final 2014 prediction: the end of the PC as we knew it
This is what the Alliance emailed to employees and members: https://www.endicottalliance.org/countdownto2015roadmap-fromthenationalcoordinator.htm
What is the significance of the words “Endicott” and “salsa” in the web addresses related to IBM unionization?
#1 Microsoft isn’t looking for a CEO, its looking for a ‘caretaker’ or a figure head, Satya Nadella serves that role perfectly. There isn’t really anything wrong with the business other than wasting time and money on transforming the business. If they drop Bing, drop Xbox, drop Mobile – they’ll be uber profitable immediately. A new CEO with an agenda from outside the company might want to execute these moves, but only Bill Gates could execute them from the board. They’ll just call it “retrenchment” and “rethinking” their priorities, and if they can get Windows 9 out in some “pre-release” form this year.. even a developers preview, they’ll recoup all that was lost in the last two years in a matter of months.
#2 IBM the holding company is in receivership, its all over except for the flowers. How the contracts are terminated or ended will be the floor show for now.
#3 BB (maybe) but like I said I think Microsoft will be thinking more about shedding weight under Gates authority. Balmer will take an extended vacation and drum up an image of disinterest. Elop will be running Microkia as a separate unit.. mostly for winding it down. BB acquisition would make sense for the patents, dark horse would be Google, burned by patents it would just be more attactive.. and BB would love the spectacle of “becoming” a part of Google.
#4 spot on
#5 Samsung is like the Warchowski bros.. you never know
#6 Stays the course
#7, 8, 9, ect… does it really matter? I think you’ve missed a growing silent group that has tuned out of Cable, TV and Netflix.. Movie Theaters are a breeding ground for depressing lost time.. first the Cord Cutters.. now.. people will just focus on everything else going on in their lives.
Your prediction #4 about Intel going fast to the embedded world and trying to embrace Apple makes sense.
Just look at an recent acquisition Intel made in 2003, buying a Brazilian company called PROFusion that had few years in existence but with an excellent human capital inside. They were specialised in Embedded Software and mostly of their work was done in PowerPC where they started.
With the acquisition intel hired the two young main directors as managers and the rest of the team as employees. For sure they are currently working in something under the covers that Intel is preparing to announce, if not, why they acquired such company ?
IBM has been mis-treating it’s employees for many years now. Setting this rediculous LOFTY goat in the
first place was a big mistake, trying to FORCE it to happen thru an economic downturn is CATASTROPHIC…
Middle management has become nothing more than YES men, and so the direction coming from the TOP has
been idiotic and enforced. Talent is now LEAVING IBM, the summer furlough was the final straw that started to
break the backs of talented employees that IBM could NOT afford to lose. Suddenly there was an announcement
about a Salary Plan for 2013, that would NOT have happened if the defection had not started.
Hardware sales are down mostly because of corporate cyclical spending and product offerings, this will NOT be
an ongoing issue, but an interesting blip on the 2015 Roadmap radar… I guess IBM will have to dump another 2 or 3 thousand U.S. employees to try to counter their rediculous planning, it’s just easier, right? Short term views
like this are taking a toll, and implosion is NOT far off. Most of the outsourced/off-shore talent that IBM has hired
over the last 5 years are NOT exceptional, and will NOT save this once great company.