Evil Google waiting on line one

telephoneLately I have been getting telephone calls from Google. Do you get them, too? The numbers they come from are in many different cities but the callers always ask to speak to the business owner (that’s me) so I can claim my business listing and my free web site from Google. But I don’t want a business listing and I don’t need a free web site, I explain. Please take my name off your list. Then they tell me the first of many lies: “We can’t take you off our list.”

Resistance is futile.

Actually the script varies a little and sometimes they say “we won’t take you off,” not “we can’t […]

By |September 7th, 2015|2015, Business, Companies, Industry, Internet, Public Relations|145 Comments
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Google’s OnHub router may save WiFi from itself

OnHubGoogle this week introduced its first WiFi router and my initial reaction was “Why?” WiFi access points and home routers tend to be low-margin commodity products that could only hurt financial results for the search giant. What made it worth the pain on Wall Street, then, for Google to introduce this gizmo? And then I realized it is Google’s best hope to save the Internet… and itself.

WiFi is everywhere and it generally sucks. WiFi has become the go-to method of networking homes and even businesses. I remember product introductions in New York back in the 80s and 90s when we were told over and over again that it cost $100 per […]

By |August 21st, 2015|2015, Companies, Gadgets, Internet, mobile technology, Product Development, Technology|123 Comments
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How I (and you?) am hurting the PC industry

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Starting in 1977 I bought a new personal computer every three years. This changed after 2010 when I was 33 years and eleven computers into the trend. That’s when I bought my current machine, a mid-2010 13-inch MacBook Pro. Five years later I have no immediate plans to replace the MacBook Pro and I think that goes a long way to explain why the PC industry is having sales problems.

My rationale for changing computers over the years came down to Moore’s Law. I theorized that if computer performance was going to double every 18 months, I couldn’t afford to be more than one generation behind the state-of-the-art if I […]

By |August 14th, 2015|2015, Gadgets, How To's, Industry, Technology|115 Comments
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Who is your IT outsourcing firm working for?

outsourcing-for-dummiesWhile the U.S. Government has been remarkably opaque about the recently discovered security breach at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), we know that personal information on at least 21.5 million present, former, and prospective federal employees was lost. The Feds claim Chinese hackers are at the bottom of it, which is disputed by the Chinese government. This, to me, raises a number of questions, especially about the possible role of IT outsourcing firms and implications for organizations beyond OPM. Does IT outsourcing make your data more vulnerable? Yes, I believe it does.

It’s easy to blame the Office of Personnel Management for its own troubles. Oversight was lax. The agency failed a security audit and […]

By |July 30th, 2015|2015, Government, Outsourcing, Privacy and Security, Uncategorized|127 Comments
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IBM is so screwed

I’ve been working on a big column or two about the Office of Personnel Management hack while at the same time helping my boys with their Kickstarter campaign to be announced in another 10 days, but then IBM had to go yesterday and announce earnings and I just couldn’t help myself. I had to put that announcement in the context you’ll see in the headline above. IBM is so screwed.

Below you’ll see the news spelled-out in red annotations right on IBM’s own slides. The details are mainly there but before you read them I want to make three points. First, IBM’s sexy new businesses (cloud, analytics, mobile, social and security or CAMSS) aren’t growing — and probably won’t be growing — […]

By |July 21st, 2015|2015, Big Data, Breaking News, cloud computing, Companies, Industry, mobile technology, Privacy and Security, Social Media|167 Comments
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