It’s Michael Dell versus the world and Dell will win

In my last column I wrote that Dell buying EMC is a great idea (for Dell) and left it to this column to more fully explain why that is so. It takes two columns because there is so much going on here in terms of both business models and technologies. As the title suggests it comes down to Michael Dell against the world and in this case I predict Dell will win, Cisco, HP and IBM will lose, Apple will be relatively unaffected and I don’t really know what it will mean for Microsoft but I think the advantage still lies with Dell.

One thing that is key is every one of these companies except Dell is publicly traded […]

By |October 14th, 2015|2015, Business, cloud computing, Companies, competition, mobile technology, Software, strategy|68 Comments
Read More

Dell buys EMC and gets the corporate cloud for free

emccloudThe Wall $treet Journal carried a story last week about Dell Computer possibly buying EMC, the big storage vendor, and this morning the New York Times confirmed it, pinning a price of $65 billion on the deal. There’s a lot to wonder about in this combination, which I think is pretty brilliant on Dell’s part even if I’m not generally in favor of mega-mergers. But it seems to me most of the experts commenting on the deal have it ass-backwards as Wall Street once again proves it doesn’t really understand technology business.

EMC has this large but aging storage division and a valuable subsidiary in VMware, of which EMC owns 80 percent. Activist investors […]

By |October 12th, 2015|2015, Business, cloud computing, Companies, Industry|30 Comments
Read More

The Cringely boys Kickstart Mineserver™, a $99 Minecraft server

When my three sons, ages 13, 11, and 9 decided to do a summer business together I thought it could be almost anything. After all, they’ve visited three dozen tech startups with me in our RV and they’ve been surrounded by technology entrepreneurs their entire lives. What business would it be?

I just never expected a $99 Minecraft server.

It’s brilliant, really. Minecraft is hugely popular but the Minecraft hardware market is almost nonexistent. It’s not that nobody thought to do such a server but that it’s a business idea most entrepreneurs would see as not having legs. It will scale, sure, but will it endure? In a few months someone — no doubt someone in Asia […]

By |September 29th, 2015|2015, Breaking News, entertainment, Entrepreneurship, Family, Gadgets, Product Development|101 Comments
Read More

Chinese talking cybersecurity means security is already lost

A longtime reader and good friend of mine sent me a link this week to a CNBC story about the loss of fingerprint records in the Office of Personnel Management hack I have written about before. It’s just one more nail in the coffin of a doltish bureaucracy that — you know I’m speaking the truth here — will probably result in those doltish bureaucrats getting even more power, even more data, and ultimately losing those data, too.

So the story says they lost the fingerprint records of 56 million people! Game over.

Remember how this story unfolded? There had been a hack and some records were compromised. Then there had been a hack and […]

By |September 25th, 2015|2015, Government, Privacy and Security|55 Comments
Read More

Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine

BobBellevilleCriesAlex Gibney’s Steve Jobs documentary is available now in some theaters, on Amazon Instant Video and, ironically, on iTunes. It’s a film that purports to figure out what made Steve Jobs tick. And it does a lot, just not that.

I’m not a dispassionate reviewer here. More than a year before Jobs died I tried to hire Alex Gibney to make a Steve Jobs film with me. At that point he suggested I be the director, that he’d coach me (“It’s not that hard,” the Oscar-winner claimed.) We talked and met but didn’t come to a deal. Later Gibney decided to do a Jobs film on his own — this film — and […]

By |September 16th, 2015|2015, Companies, entertainment, Industry, Media, Movies, People|56 Comments
Read More