It’s time to wrap up all these 2018 predictions, so here are my final three in which Apple finds a new groove, IBM prepares for a leadership change, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg gives up a dream.
Apple has long needed a new franchise. It’s been almost eight years since the iPad (Apple’s last new business) was introduced. Thanks to Donald Trump’s tax plan, Cupertino can probably stretch its stock market winning streak for another 2-3 years with cash repatriation, share buy-backs, dividend increases and cost reductions, but the company really needs another new $20+ billion business and it will take every one of those years to get a new one up to scale.
Turning into a movie studio won’t be Apple’s next big business. The profit margins aren’t high enough for one thing, but even more important there simply isn’t room for another $20 billion player in an already crowded entertainment market. Apple realizes this or they would have committed a lot more than $1 billion to video productions in 2018. By Apple standards, making TV and movies is a hobby.
The only place where Apple can make a high-margin splash that really makes sense is in the cloud. Their cloud infrastructure is in place but underutilized. Remember my column years ago about visiting Apple’s North Carolina data center? Well things haven’t changed much since then yet Apple just keeps building capacity. Their cloud capacity is easily as big as Microsoft’s. Now all Apple needs is something to do with the excess.
There is a significant trend right now in moving both applications and desktops to virtual cloud machines. The U.S. government, for example, seems headed to replacing its eight million PCs with virtual devices. So far the only government computers that won’t be replaced, however, are Macs because of their proprietary PROMs. Windows and Linux run fine from the cloud but so far Macs do not unless the target data center is made entirely of Mac Minis as some have done.
My prediction #8, then, is that Apple will in 2018 buy one or more of the many startups helping shift desktop computing loads to the cloud. Cupertino will compete with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft offering virtual cloud PCs.
This might look like a hobby, too, given that Mac sales are only about 15 percent of Apple’s total volume. But that would be a very near-sighted look. Customer devices are still needed to access these virtual desktops and many of those devices in business — even for Windows virtual desktops — are iPads and iPhones running iOS. So promoting Mac app cloud migration would sell more iOS devices.
Even more important, however, is that there’s an opportunity here to grab market leadership. It would be uncharacteristic of Apple to make a grab for enterprise IT leadership but crazy times call for crazy actions. And by offering a public cloud service that would support Apple, Linux and Windows virtual PCs, Apple would have a shot at literally stealing from Microsoft the future of the Windows business — a typical Apple lead from behind move. Remember Apple didn’t invent the smart phone or the tablet yet today leads both markets.
IBM also needs new $20 billion businesses. Remember that CAMSS (cloud, analytics, mobile, security and social) were supposed to be the sources of IBM’s growth in the next decade? Well that hasn’t been working or Warren Buffett would have held onto his IBM shares. Over the past year, Berkshire Hathaway has dropped its IBM holdings from $10 billion to $300 million. And given the delay Berkshire inserts in reporting such sales it is likely the company now holds no IBM shares at all. All Buffett has said so far is that the company wasn’t what he once thought it was, whatever that means. But it leads me to my easiest prediction by far, which is that Ginni Rometty will this year be replaced as IBM CEO.
This is an easy prediction to make both because all IBM CEOs not named Watson seem to retire at 60 (Rometty’s current age) but also because her tenure in the office has been an abject failure as explained in excruciating detail in my book The Decline and Fall of IBM.
The more difficult prediction would be identifying Rometty’s replacement. If he or she is a career IBMer it won’t bode well for Big Blue, which is a place where the smart executives left long ago. My advice is to hire an outsider like when Lou Gerstner replaced John Akers in the early 1990s. Only a true outsider can lead the total cultural change required to save IBM from death. Gerstner seemed to be doing just that but look how the company snapped right back into its bad old ways under Sam Palmisano. Maybe Buffett just decided IBM was a lost cause.
A recently-departed IBM sales guy told me the other day “you know they really hate you.” And it’s true. They hate me for my eleven years of reporting bad executive decisions and poor planning ever since I discovered in a hotel bar in Rochester, MN back in 2007 that IBM employees hated their company. I’ve probably cost IBM millions over that period but IBM management cost the company tens of billions over the same time. Hating must be easier than actually listening.
My final 2018 prediction is that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg will give up his political ambitions. What, you didn’t know Zuck wants to be President? I’m pretty sure he once did have such a goal and, heck, if Trump can do it why not a younger, smarter guy whose wealth is real? Zuckerberg’s recent listening tours are all a part of his very deliberate transformation from geek to statesman. Alas, it won’t work.
The problem for Zuckerberg isn’t that he couldn’t do the job, it’s that the personal cost is too high. Presidents have no privacy, their every move is criticized, and for a guy like Zuckerberg who likes to be in control, there’s damned little control actually available. He’s starting to realize this just as Facebook needs more attention during the Fake News and Russian election tampering crises, which are both going to be brutal for Facebook going forward.
If he doesn’t become President, then, what will be Zuckerberg’s second act? That depends on how he wants to be perceived. If Zuckerberg needs to be the winner in his category, there’s probably no way he can beat Bill Gates as a philanthropist. Gates will always have more money and experience. Not that Zuckerberg can’t still be a philanthropist, but I don’t think he’ll identify that as his principal occupation as Gates presently does. It should be interesting to see what he eventually chooses to do, instead.
This Russian election tampering needs to be looked at carefully. What we have is a handful of analysts selected by a member of Team Clinton high in the government got together and issued findings that were then reported as ‘the conclusion of 17 intelligence agencies’, which was really just four agencies, which was just these analysts, AND they used the Steele dossier as evidence.
Leaving that to one side, the actual Facebook usage was minor. It was about a few hundred thousand dollars(which Mueller then changes the terms and describes as a million a month), and most of this was spent AFTER the election. Despite Mueller saying they learned to target swing states, they spent $54 in Wisconsin, $2000 in Penn, $900 in Michigan.
People need to consider that this was a campaign not to spend money to swing the election, but a campaign to make money off of people who cared about the election. Build up facebook posts and followers, then sell targeted ads which Mueller identified but does not connect the dots. This is why they supported Bernie and Trump, two people who had a large number of followers. It’s why they didn’t mind going after Rubio and Cruz the biggest threats to Hillary. It’s why they promoted seemingly contradictory causes like Black Lives Matter and supporting Islamic rights. It also explains why they promoted anti-Trump rallies(including the only one that got lots of attention, Nov 12 in New York with Michael Moore and promoted on air by CNN).
This company’s owner is described as ‘Putin’s chef’ to connect to Russia, but what is left out is how he got the job. He hired a bunch of trolls to promote his food company online, and eventually realized there is a lot of money to make in this, and the Internet Research Agency was born. It was profiled well before the election, including where they manufactured shootings and other calamities as well as news coverage of these shootings.
Nothing in the the Steele dossier has been proven to not be true.
Even the Stormy Daniels saga leads credence to the more salacious aspects of the dossier.
There are many ways of not telling the truth. Lying is merely the most obvious.
nothing has been proven to not be true?!? So… if I write that you beat your wife, then you have to go out and disprove this??
No…. the Steele dossier is a fraud on multiple levels. And that will come out.
The political and moral will to face that and what it portends for those who deliberately pursued that odious
road, may yet come out.
As for the noodling about Zuckerberg wanting to be President, the more important issues concern social media censorship on Facebook and all the other avenues, youtube, twitter et al. The oil companies of over 110 yrs ago, were taken apart because they did hold an unreasonable monapoly, but the monopoly of these social media giants is far beyond that of Standard Oil in it’s day.
People who are not ‘progressive’ are being hounded off these gianst and have had to seek ‘… suit was challenging Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) under the First Amendment, which provides immunity from lawsuits to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, thereby permitting these social media giants to engage in government-sanctioned censorship and discriminatory business practices free from legal challenge. Facebook and Google take in roughly half of all Internet ad revenue.
The routine spying and censoring of their customers massaging everything from the daily news to what people buy. They broke up Standard Oil and then, much later, Ma Bell.
Zuckerberg, and Facebook, and Twitter, and Google all should be subjected to rules that prevent unfair censorship on their platforms.
Just today… “A woman from Buffalo has admitted to sending threatening tweets to FBI employees and former military members on behalf of ISIS.
Timothy A. Garrison, United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, announced that a Buffalo, Mo., woman pleaded guilty in federal court today to using Twitter to transmit threatening communications against several persons, including two FBI employees and two former members of the military and their families, on behalf of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, also known as ISIS.
Safya Roe Yassin, 40, of Buffalo, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge M. Douglas Harpool to two counts of transmitting threatening communications across state lines, contained in a July 19, 2016, federal indictment.
By pleading guilty today, Yassin admitted that she maintained a series of Twitter accounts under the pseudonym “Muslimah” that she used to post, or tweet, messages in support of ISIS, a designated foreign terrorist organization. Yassin also re-posted, or re-tweeted, messages she knew were authored by ISIS operatives residing overseas.”
Now this is a daily occurrence, and the point is that Twitter, and Facebook have been, meanwhile, busy hounding and persecuting foes of jihad terror, while leaving up ISIS accounts to operate freely.
This is very serious, very dangerous, very tyrannic, and then some.
You have already failed on your prediction that new mineserver specs would be available soon.
Who has been a worse CEO, Rommetty or Cringely?
Cringely banked a very high profit margin by pocketing sales with no cost, but no sales growth, unless the still running mineserver.com is getting purchases.
Rommetty has been able to keep investors happy for some time, while presumably upsetting customers.
Rommetty is making employees very unhappy, while Cringely’s employees are happy they don’t have to do any more work.
Rommetty made the largest investor in the world unhappy and he dumped shared, but before that she convinced him to buy in, which helped to stabilize the company and make the doubters look foolish, so in total that is a net gain.
“This is an easy prediction to make both because all IBM CEOs not named Watson seem to retire at 60 (Rometty’s current age) but also because her tenure in the office has been an abject failure as explained in excruciating detail in my book The Decline and Fall of IBM.”
Did you just use yourself as a source to support your own claim? Oh my, I’ve seen it all…You’re better than that, Bob!
Also nice shameless plug; A hyperlink and everything. Wow! “Please buy my book, I’m homeless!”
@Chris D – “You’re better than that, Bob!”. He used to be but he isn’t anymore!
I predict IBM will merge with HPE and Meg Whitman will be the new CEO of the combined companies.
I agree. The future of Enterprise IT is AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and smaller open source companies. It highly likely that the old enterprise companies will all merge together to cut costs and survive on their legacy. So Dell, IBM, HPE, and old-style enterprise software companies like CA etc are liked to merge or be bought by private equity companies who will load them up with debt, extract any remain value and live them to die. Capitalism can be brutal sometimes…..
How can I like this some more?
Actually Meg Whitman is an awesome CEO. She actually did wonders with HP when she was there, and while she was at eBay, she did well too. I wish this would happen, but it won’t. Meg is one of the few CEO’s who came from a startup and “gets technology and innovation”. I think she got tired of fighting the bureaucracy at HP. Once a company becomes primarily owned by Investors instead of Inventors, then the purpose shifts from building and innovating to just “making money”. Meg was put in an unfortunate situation at HP, with a dying company, tried to save it, but until someone owns who really wants to Invent, it is just as lost as IBM, Oracle, or Apple. I put Oracle in there because even though Larry Ellison still owns most of it, he’s just wants the dividends, profits, etc. to live his life. It’s no longer about inventing, it’s about “making money”.
The Apple cloud thing makes some sense. Apple would not do an open cloud infrastructure service. It is not their way. Let the pioneers get arrows in their backs, then do a slick/safe/easy to use version is more like Apple.
They may do a cloud service to provide a back end for Apps, and the new speaker. They could capture more revenue off the app store. Then make an App Store of IoT and web services. The services would not be open source, like Amazon and Google. Nope, based on Swift and tied to their cloud.
yeah, but Apple tends to get into markets because the current “solutions” don’t serve a particularly prominent need of a valuable customer segment. i’m not sure Bob’s clarified “what” that is…without it, it’s hard to understand what Apple would be doing, judging whether they could be successful at it, and how they might make it the “next” $20B business…
You *DO* know that Apple runs iCloud atop AWS and GCP, right?
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-scores-victory-over-amazon-apple-is-a-cloud-customer-2018-2?r=UK&IR=T
Check the article again. That’s only for mass storage and even then is probably just for multiple redundancy. All the complex high value processing like Siri, Apple Maps and Apple Music runs in their own data centres.
Apple declared itself as CONSUMER not enterprise company so Bob your prediction about Apple is as good as it will buy Adobe.
Yes, but a “prediction” is something about the future. In 2000, you could have just as well have said, “Apple has declared itself as a COMPUTER company and not a music company so…”
And who is to say that enterprise desktop computing isn’t a consumer experience these days? How many companies might be looking to — in the term of the previous decade — outsource that function if Apple made it attractive enough? It’s a cost center and, when done poorly enough, is a tremendous source of employee dissatisfaction. BYOB? Sure, just load the Apple virtual desktop client and have at it. Upgrade cycles, patching, testing, help desk, they all go away,
Prediction is just fantasy land. Even as computer company Apple never sold any significant number of computers to enterprises – to education system yes but not to enterprises. Apple just does not have infrastructure to work with enterprises – no dedicated sales force no enterprise support. When Sun Microsystem was for sale lot of expectations was Apple will buy them and go into enterprise environment but Apple never even talked to them. When Steve Jobs talked to Tim Cook about joining Apple he told him Apple would go 100 % consumer. That is why you and Bob are wrong. It simply won’t happen. Apple has zero percent interest to be there.
For everyone thinking Apple will one day start serving enterprise customers please watch Charlie Rose interview with Tim Cook on PBS – should be available on itunes or youtube
Apple only does consumer because the interoperability requirements are much simpler, the legacy support requirements are completely in their hands, the security requirements are much more limited, etc. You can simply tell consumers that a feature is not available and they’ll probably go with whatever you offer if you have a good product in most other basic respects. If you tell business that a feature isn’t available they’ll find another vendor. Business requirements are real and consumers only require that their phones stay locked, more or less. But the real problem with enterprise IT is that they write their own software.
Remember ten years ago how much existing educational Flash content wasn’t available for the millions of new iPads in schools? Apple said they couldn’t get Flash to run on their platform, but that’s bogus. They just didn’t want to. If they’d at least claimed they wouldn’t do it because of the security holes it would have been a little better, but honestly there is no valuable data on the third grade’s iPad cart. What they were really walling off was the ability to run apps on the platform without going through the Apple Store.
Flash apps can be pulled off any web page and run. That means anyone can just whip up an app and use it without paying Apple’s 30% tax. But enterprise IT writes stuff all the time: java, VB, web apps, customized apps from SAP and other industry-specific vendors (eg managing manufacturing equipment or printing presses) and a host of other stuff. None of those vendors are putting that stuff into the Apple store, and even if they did Apple wants nothing to do with supporting it.
Because in the end Apple likes the simplicity of iOS only interacting with itself and the internet. They chop off legacy support ruthlessly: they do not let users replace batteries in order to guarantee a finite lifetime for devices. They killed off their own hardware (Mini, Server) when it became a support issue that didn’t make any money. They don’t do complicated things because that’s where companies get bogged down and run into difficulty. So despite the vast profits they might make there, Enterprise IT is a swamp fraught with perils that would reduce margins and smash the elegance. Never happening.
All you said is true but there is one more reason to it I think. As Tim Cook told Charlie Rose enterprise business is cutthroat business – margins are low and competition is tough. It is true that on each computer you sell to consumer you can sell three of them to businesses but Steve Jobs decided it was easier to be monopoly (with its own os that is was Apple is in a way) than to compete with others for enterprise business.
Zuckerberg won’t run because in the course of little more than 2 years Facebook has gone from being seen as a great invention to a product ranked somewhere between the airlines and HMOs in terms of public hostility. Maybe it’s different out where their headquarters are but in the rest of the country the mood is far more sullen than it was when Microsoft was taken to the woodshed in the ’90s.
Zuckerberg once said and I quote: “Young people are just smarter.” Zuckerberg will need to scale down his life in all areas because he is becoming more stupid as he gets older and that means he needs to find 22 year old CEO to take over Facebook. Move over Zuck because you are becoming an idiot.
He can be political without running, for instance leading some sort of political movement, eg against guns or to help privacy our end poverty. As a speaker he could be highly influential, without having to commit himself.
Have you seen Zuckerberg speak? I think the main problem with that though isn’t his heavy sweating or strangely jumbled delivery but that it’s not even clear what issues he actually cares about that are driving him into politics.
The parodies are far more entertaining anyway.
I can remember when the comments section, was full of thoughtful comments. I look forward to the predictions, not for the acuracy, but for the possibilities.
Thanks Bob for keeping up your side.
I’ve tried to comment a few times, but my comments keep being eaten by the spam filter. I think Bob must have turned it up to 11.
Assuming prediction #8 is true, my money is on Apple buying Frame to run their app cloud. This company has been running under the radar just enough that Amazon and MS aren’t paying attention, yet their solution is solid and just keeps getting better Just ask Autodesk. And they’re privately held so no messy stockholders to deal with.
Apple continues to build out data center capacity.
Remember the whole Ruby Screen fiasco? Well, Apple had to step in and take over the assets here in Mesa, Arizona, which principally was the huge new factory building that was never completed. Guess what it is now? A brand-spanking new Apple Data Center.
Rewind for a moment Bob,
Gerstner was the one who got employees to hate him and IBM with a passion. He eliminated traditional retirement plans (for which he receives $1M / year for life) and announced it on Friday night which caused employees to sue and which IBM lost.
He also bought back stock at high prices, among a number of other stupid moves.
In the end, he left to spend more time with his family (in other words, he was shown the door).
Gerstner as a role model is definitely not the kind of guy they need.
Gerstner was the first CEO who started treating IBM like the investors wanted. He started off with great intentions meeting with customers, finding out what they wanted, fixing problems, building to customer wants and needs. But it was already all about the shareholders, hence the large layoffs. Even then, his purpose was to make sure the customers and shareholders were happy. Sam and Ginni have just continued the tradition.
Yıllar öncesinde ev taşıma derdinden çok eşyaları toparlamak zor ve sıkıcı geliyordu.Bu taşıma ritüellerinin son bulduğu büyük bir devrim olarak görebileceğimiz evden eve nakliyat sektörü; sizin elinizi hiçbir şeye sürmediğiniz, gözlerinizin önünde eşyalarınızın sistemli, düzenli ve en az sizin gösterdiğiniz özenle toparlandığı, taşındığı ve yerleştirildiği bir yöntemdir. Gerek işinizden dolayı, gerekse özel zevkleriniz doğrultusunda değiştirmek durumunda kaldığınız yaşam merkezlerinizin, eskiden yeniye geçişin tam ortasında kalan evden eve nakliyat firmaları sizlere sundukları hizmetle bu sorunlu sürecin sıfır riskle yeni yaşamınızla sonlandırılması konusunda tecrübe sahibidir Diyarbakır Evden Eve Nakliyat Firması olarak malzemeleri ambalaj, koli ve bez’lere sararak işimizi kaliteli yapmaya özen göstermekteyiz.
http://diyarbakir-evdeneve-nakliyat.com/DiyarbakirEvdenEveNakliyat
I agree with everything except the “Gerek işinizden dolayı, gerekse özel zevkleriniz ” part.
I guess it got through the spam filter since there were no keywords for it to recognize. Another AI failure.
Regarding Zuckerberg, he is deeply implicated in the Russian influence scandal.
First, the Steele dossier isn’t some kind of wingnut smear job. It is raw intelligence. We normally never see raw intelligence and aren’t used to it. Likely there is disinformation (probably planted by the Russian FSB) in it. But Steele is serious and a lot of that material is proving to be real. Don’t forget, it was started by Republicans. So let’s stop the smear job the Trump Team has put out there to quash it.
Second and more important. Major Russian figures have long been involved in funding Facebook. A long while back (in FB terms at least) I was doing work in Eastern Europe where people in business and government are very aware of Russian meddling since it is a common occurrence. A colleague who worked with some of the richest people in those countries told me that it as common knowledge that Putin was a major investor in Putin, even the largest single investor. I thought he must have heard something wrong or was going bonkers, but he is a straight arrow so I started looking this up. Even now it’s hard to find this kind of information since the FSB and others are tasked to keep it obscure, but check out Yuri Milner … https://qz.com/1121238/who-is-yuri-milner-the-russian-billionaire-who-funneled-kremlin-money-into-facebook/
Zuckerberg is the one Manchurian Candidate I am MORE afraid of than Trump.
Spending on Facebook ads was the least of Russian interference.
It’s worthwhile to read Mueller’s indictment, or at least a good summary of it.
Did Russia Affect the 2016 Election? It’s Now Undeniable
https://www.wired.com/story/did-russia-affect-the-2016-election-its-now-undeniable/
The idea that “Russia” spent millions to “influence” “American opinion” is perfectly magical thinking. As magical as believing that receiving 250,000 dollars from the Russian banking industry wasn’t going to influence the Clintons. As a famous writer once said, allegations are not indictments, indictments are not arrests, arrests are not convictions. Do people believe everything you read on the internet, or only what they want to believe?
Assuming by “magical” you mean “untrue”, then you are saying two things: 1) that Russia spent millions to influence American opinion is false, and 2) that receiving 250,000 dollars from the Russian banking industry wasn’t going to influence the Clintons is also false. In other words: 1) Russia may have spent millions, but not for the purpose of influencing American opinion, and 2) The Clintons received $250K from Russian banking, which was going to influence them.
Cloud compute is not about capabilities; it adds latency, security issues, points of failure, and horrible user workflows. It is about subscriptions. I believe Apple will continue to keep the App on the desktop/mobile device. Apple’s cloud will continue to evolve to be a value add. There development tools have been focused on device-compute. I don’t see that changing.
Right idea about Apple, wrong conclusion. The untapped market for Apple is going after the people who were abandoned by Yahoo/Flickr and aren’t seeing good revenue from their YouTube accounts due to demonetization. Some of these people are beginning to discover they can use WordPress or other hosting services but it is still pretty intimidating, especially when you have to pick from hundreds of templates and don’t really have any help. Apple has the retail locations for training, can tap into the creative sphere where they still have a lot of street cred, and most importantly already has a system in place for you to pay them. I can’t go to Facebook and pay them money to distribute and host my content. YouTube has Red but that’s more for audiences than it is for producers. WordPress suffers from the same lack of support that most open source products do, it’s either a “WordPress for the moron” books or take a class from some unknown instructor.
I would love to see a paid alternative to Facebook, where I own my content, pay a reasonable monthly fee and don’t have my thoughts sold to someone for annoying advertising. And just as easy to use, or even easier (although pretty hard to top the share button on everything in the OS). Sure might need to make an Android app but hey even Microsoft had Office for Macs since forever.
Actually that is a sound and interesting conclusion. I just don’t know if the SOHO market would really go for it – I think it’s a direction that AWS would likely take. I think it’s more likely that they gradually up the price of cloud services like icloud / itunes / appleTV, add maybe games. If they keep up trust I think they could go 2x on current pixing easily… We’ll pay more and more without really noticing it. Frog in gradually heated water scenario.
Pixing: “Back and forth picture messaging. Usually flirtatious or Sexual.” https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pixing
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This was the best comment yet. LOL.
So the desktop is moving to the Cloud? Amazing – just like the SunRay system that Sun Microsystems had twenty years ago! What’s next – a killer app like VisiCalc from twenty years before that?
About 10 years ago, my daughter was in Girl Scouts with the daughter of an Apple director. At the time, Sun had not yet been bought by Oracle, and I proposed that Apple should buy Sun and get into the Enterprise business. He was aghast at the idea and basically called me a fool for even proposing such a deal. Apple was clearly a consumer products company and had “absolutely” no interest in entering the enterprise business. It was clear to me at the time that it was burned into the DNA of Apple employees by Steve Jobs. While Tim Cook has taken over, how much of that Steve Jobs culture is still in the organization? I cannot disagree more that Apple is not entering the cloud unless it is consumer cloud. I do think that Apple, without Jobs, is missing the mark with consumers and tech, and at least for me, the “wow” factor is gone. If Apple does enter Enterprise Cloud, it will be a clear sign that the finance zombies have taken over, and it’s time to look for innovation elsewhere. Apple will be a “me too” company in the cloud. Apple needs a new generation of Apple Music infused with AI in music to find a lead people to bands that they love. And then they need to do it with other media. Apple can do better with Siri as well.
Here are things I “would” invest in if I were running Apple.
1. Healthcare medical records. Apple is still a very widely trusted brand, people still trust it more than Microsoft and even Google. My iPhone is very personal. Most of the future of healthcare will be forward-focused, meaning health tracking like heart rate, oxygen levels, blood sugar levels, exercise, and so forth. Apple Watch already gathers quite a bit. My Samsung S7 can measure my SPO2 levels off my finger, so I bet an Apple Watch could as well. So, link this thing to my doctor with a secure application, download my medications into the medical record. If I go into a hospital, link the hospital portal medical records as well. But give me control of it, to share or not. Get it smarter in recognizing loss of pulse, falls, and other dangerous situations like being in an accident (sudden deceleration in the accelerometer). With aging baby boomers, I think this is an easy win. With the trust of the public, who better to keep your medical record than yourself…? Let it coach me with the blood tests from my doctor’s office, in weight loss, in calories I need to eat. Secure it in a secure Apple Cloud that only you can access with biometrics.
2. Buy transactional payment systems, payment data, and social/recommendations. The obvious candidates in my mind are Ticket Master, Fandango, SABRE or Amadeus, and Acxiom. Gather as much data about what people are actually buying. Make friends with Google and Facebook to the point that you can predict what people want, and when they have the money to buy it.
3. Next, LISTEN to consumers about what they want and when they want it. Nothing bothers me more than seeing ads when I just bought the product or service. Either you tell me I made the wrong choice (assuming you are offering a better option), or you’re wasting your ad money. A smart AI system might “ask” the customer when they are getting a tax refund or bonus, or Christmas/Birthday money, and then look at the PInterest, Amazon Cart, etc. and then let the advertiser know when the best shot at “really” selling them is. We just finished 7 days of rain in my city, and a smart advertiser would have been selling me Amazon delivery of raincoats long before this big weather event (or series of events) came through. Same could be said of home/lawn stuff. I hired my fertilizer guy because he knew the exact 2 week period to put down pre-emergent to prevent weeds all season. He was smart enough to re-apply it if we had a rain larger than 1/2 inch. He only needed to visit 3 times each season, and my yard looked great all year. I’m looking at SUVs right now, and Cars.com is smart enough to offer me options, and even tell me when the price has dropped on SUVs I have looked at. I would like a button, once I buy the car, to say, “Thanks, I’ve bought it already” and then they can stop wasting their ad dollars. AI needs to get a lot better, IMO.
On Ginni Romnetti, she turned 60 last July. At that time, there was wide speculation that she would retire. The inside rumor was that she has broke tradition, and asked for 3 more years to “finish” the transition to the new business model. It is purely a numbers game to the people who will decide Ginni’s fate. Sales may not have to grow, but there had better be profits to fund divideds. The deciders are financial zombies and they want “blood”, which for them is cash for dividends, and buybacks. So, in making this prediction, you are betting that Ginni is out of cuts and tricks in 2018 to make the numbers.
On Zuckerberg. Facebook, PInterest, Instagram, and Snap started as a place for people to express their likes, wants, and opinions. People loved that. Once that data starts getting mined by AI robots to sell stuff to us, or decide if we are “dangerous”, then it and social media are done as a platform. As much as the money zombies see it as valuable, people aren’t fools. Yes, Zuckerberg probably should give a bunch away, before his company collapses like MySpace. Remember them? I am on Facebook now long enough to see what is happening in the neighborhood, but maybe the healthier choice would be if we all just went and met each other in person.
Apparently, Apple is using Google for iCloud storage. Which seems odd.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/26/apple-confirms-it-uses-google-cloud-for-icloud.html
It does sound a little odd at first, but they leverage AWS, too (http://www.businessinsider.com/google-scores-victory-over-amazon-apple-is-a-cloud-customer-2018-2?r=UK&IR=T)
If what they’re doing is what Dropbox or Netflix (to a lesser degree) did, then they’ve built the *capacity* without being beholden to using it right away, and instead have developed all of the in-house cloud tech knowledge they need to switch from public to private cloud more-or-less seemlessly
Taşıma experi taşınmanızın her aşamasında ekibini yönlendirmek ve değerli eşyalarınızı evden eve taşırken gerekli her türlü önlemi almak ile sorumludur. Taşınma gününde Taşınma experi, bu önemli günde sizi yalnız bırakmayacak ve operasyonun devamında taşınmayı gerçekleştirecek olan Aslan Tur Nakliyat Taşınma Ekibi ile sizi tanıştırır. Bu aşamalardan sonra operasyon başlar. Evinizde bulunan tüm eşyalarınız profesyonel ekipler tarafından çeşitli boy ve ebatlardaki koli ve paketleme malzemeleriyle muhafaza edilerek taşınmaya hazır hale getirilir. Tüm paketler numaralandırılarak içersindeki eşyaların muhteviyatı belirtilir. Diyarbakır evden eve nakliyat hizmeti ile sizlerin huzurunuzdayız.
http://diyarbakir-evdeneve-nakliyat.com/DiyarbakirEvdenEveNakliyat
Gerstner started out well enough, by doing nothing while studying the problem. Wall Street went looking for other game to feed on. IBM started to recover, then Gerstner imploded the company with astonishingly poor HR decisions (hint: your company consists solely of workers, alienate or take the workers away and how long will your company last?) This isn’t to say that layoffs were not necessary, but after mass layoffs the badly implemented pension change cost literally several 10’s of billions of dollars in lost shareholder value– and continues to erode value even today, as many of the shafted workers remaining have a deep seated lack of faith in corporate edicts. Palmisano continued the idiotic policies of Gerstner, but at least Palmisano was intelligent and successfully cashed in on services (sadly, clinging to that one trick 20 EPS pony for too long). Rometty is an improvement over her immediate predecessors, but isn’t on a par with a Watson (well, not that there are any current CEOs that seem to be of that caliber).
At the moment, there isn’t a clear reason to replace Rometty. The presumption is to change direction to… what? Very few American companies manage to change direction successfully, between the Scylla of private equity hyenas and Charybdis of fear of cannibalizing existing lines of business, or just shear management incompetence.
My opinion is that Rometty lacks sufficient imagination and is too risk averse. She chose a direction, and changing that direction half way to the bitter or happy end only increases the chances of abject Kodak grade failure. The current trajectory doesn’t look wildly successful, but doesn’t look disastrous either.
[…] readers may remember that one of my predictions for 2018 was that Zuckerberg would this year give up his Presidential […]
Bob- you are correct.. dont let the trolls bother you. You know who this is..
Re: Ronc March 8, 2018 at 5:37 pm – Reply
Pixing: “Back and forth picture messaging. Usually flirtatious or Sexual.” https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pixing
On second thought, he means “pixing” means “pricing”.
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…and here’s a likely preview of who IBM is teeing up for Ginny’s successor: Bridget van Kralingen, their current blockchain guru, an industrial psychologist who headed up financial services consulting for Deloitte then IBM Global Services:
they’re certainly giving her the PR tour
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibms-go-to-disrupter-runs-toward-faster-growth-1532523600
https://www.businessinsider.com/a-top-ibm-exec-says-all-bosses-should-know-one-basic-thing-about-people-2018-7
http://fortune.com/most-powerful-women/bridget-van-kralingen-40/
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