The Decline and Fall of IBM

Cringely_eBook-cover_1563x2500Well my IBM eBook is finally available. Right now that’s just on Amazon.com for the Kindle (just click the link to the right) but by next week it will be on every eBook platform (iPad Nook, etc.) and there will be a trade paperback as well as an audio edition. I’ll announce all of those here as they appear. 

I feel I owe an explanation for the long delay in publishing this book. I finished it in early January, about a week after my mother died, only to learn that my old-school book publisher didn’t want to touch it. Or more properly they wanted […]

By |June 4th, 2014|2014, Books, Breaking News, Business, Companies, Computing, Finance, Industry, Outsourcing|229 Comments
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Apple’s iPad Problem

ipadboyzMy three sons share an Apple iPad given to them by Mimi, their grandmother. When she bought it a couple years ago the iPad was top-of-the-line with 64 gigs and a Retina display. The boys run it hard on car trips where it functions as a hotspot and under covers in their bedrooms along with a couple iPhones, iPod Touches, various Kindles and some cheaper seven-inch Android tablets. In all we have probably a dozen touchscreen devices in the house but most of the action takes place on iPhones or that one iPad. Great for Apple, right? Not really. Apple’s iPad sales are dropping you see and the reason nobody seems to […]

By |May 19th, 2014|2014, Companies, Computing, Family, Gadgets, Industry, mobile technology, Phones, Tablets|79 Comments
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Avram Miller says Steve Jobs has one more Apple intro

steve-jobs-apple-big-brotherWe all have friends (people we know) and friends (people we not only know but hang out with). Maybe the better contrast might be between friends and buddies. Well Avram Miller is one of my buddies. He lives down the road from me and my kids prefer his pool to ours because his is solar heated. The retired Intel VP of business development is quite a character, knows a lot of people who know people, and understands the business of technology at a level few people do. So when he wrote a post this morning predicting that Apple will clean Google’s clock in search, I sat up in my chair.

Avram’s thesis is […]

By |April 28th, 2014|2014, Breaking News, Companies, Internet, Social Media, Software, Technology|125 Comments
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Some thoughts on the passing of Windows XP

winXPIt may be hard to believe but there was a time when people looked forward to new versions of operating systems. Before Windows XP many PC operating systems were not very good. The developers of applications had to code around problems.  Companies wanted their business applications to be more reliable.  Over the years operating systems improved.

Before Windows XP Microsoft had two PC operating systems.  One was the descendant of Windows 95 the other of Window NT.  In the years that preceded Windows XP Microsoft incrementally improved the user interface on the Windows 95 side and the reliability and performance on the NT side.   Windows XP was the convergence of the best of both.   Before XP […]

By |April 9th, 2014|2014, Companies, Computing, Software, Technology|71 Comments
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Facebook drones won’t work for aerial Internet

Screen Shot 2014-03-31 at 12.50.56 PMFacebook, trying to be ever more like Google, announced last week that it was thinking of building a global ISP in the sky. Now this is something I’ve written about several times in the past and even predicted to some extent, so I’d like to look at what Facebook has said so far and predict what will and won’t work.

Longtime readers will know I’ve written twice before (here and here) about satellite Internet and twice about aerial Internet, too (here and here), so I’ve been thinking about this for over a decade and even ran some experiments back when I lived in […]

By |March 31st, 2014|2014, Companies, How To's, Internet, mobile technology|62 Comments
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