Ginni the Eagle: IBM’s Corporate “Transformation”

IBMI promised a follow-up to my post from last week about IBM’s massive layoffs and here it is. My goal is first to give a few more details of the layoff primarily gleaned from many copies of their separation documents sent to me by laid-off IBMers, but mainly I’m here to explain the literal impossibility of Big Blue’s self-described “transformation” that’s currently in process. My point is not that transformations can’t happen, but that IBM didn’t transform the parts it should and now it’s probably too late.

First let’s take a look at the separation docs. Whether you give a damn about IBM or not, if you work for […]

By |March 22nd, 2016|2016, cloud computing, Companies, Industry, Intellectual Property, strategy|146 Comments
Read More

$99 Mineserver: The Devil is in the Details

IMG_0734You may recall my three sons ran a successful Kickstarter campaign last fall for their $99 Mineserver, a multiuser Minecraft server the size of a pack (not a carton) of cigarettes. On the eve of their product finally shipping here’s an update with some lessons for any complex technical project.

At the time we shot the Kickstarter video my kids already had in hand a functional prototype. Everything seen in the video was real and the boys felt that only producing custom cases really stood in the way of shipping. How wrong they were!

First we needed a mobile app to administer the server so we hired an experienced […]

By |March 17th, 2016|2016, Business, Entrepreneurship, Family, Gadgets|86 Comments
Read More

What’s happening at IBM (it’s dying)

Corporate-Life-CycleThis is a column I didn’t want to write. Like many of you I am tired of IBM stories and the company that was once an industry leader has become, at best, a poster child for how not to manage the later stages of a corporate life cycle. But because what’s happening at IBM is also happening right now at hundreds of other big technology companies makes it worth covering. So let me be clear: IBM is dying.

Last week a huge round of layoffs hit IBM just as I predicted back in January. The company is releasing as few details as possible. Nobody, for example, knows exactly how big […]

By |March 8th, 2016|2016, Business, Companies, Industry, Predictions|149 Comments
Read More

The FBI v. Apple isn’t at all the way you think it is

cookjpgThe FBI holds an iPhone that was owned by one of the San Bernardino terrorists, Syed Rizwan Farook, and wants Apple to crack it. Apple CEO Tim Cook is defying the FBI request and the court order that accompanied it, saying that cracking the phone would require developing a special version of iOS that could bypass passcode encryption. If such a genetically modified mobile OS escaped into the wild it could be used by anyone to crack any current iPhone, which would be bad for Apple’s users and bad for Amurica, Cook says. So he won’t do it, dag nabbit.

That’s the big picture story dominating the tech news this […]

By |February 19th, 2016|2016, Government, law, mobile technology, Privacy and Security|140 Comments
Read More

Why Apple doesn’t sell televisions

appledolbyAt least twice over the past decade Apple has been close to announcing its own television. Not the Apple TV set top box but actual big screen TVs with, well, big screens. But both times I’ve heard about this Apple backed away at the last minute. And the reason why they did was because even an Apple television would be just another television with an Apple logo. Steve Jobs realized that TVs had become a commodity and there didn’t seem to be an obvious way to make Apple’s television special. I’m not here to say Apple has finally found its TV design path as suggested in Walter Isaacson’s book and will be doing […]

By |February 10th, 2016|2016, Companies, entertainment, Intellectual Property, Movies, strategy, Television|57 Comments
Read More