See you on the golf course, John, Cisco is in trouble

ballmerchambersLast week I began this series on large companies in turmoil by looking at Intel, which I saw trying to guarantee its future through enlightened acquisitions that actually emulated this week’s company — Cisco Systems. So if Cisco already knows how to assimilate other companies and technologies to stay ahead of the market, how can they have a problem? Cisco’s problem is their market is mature and being commoditized with all boats sinking. And this time there isn’t an obvious new idea to buy.

Cisco is a becoming a very expensive utility appliance.  The revenues streams at Cisco that are at risk:

–          Enterprise routers for T-1 services versus DOCSIS 3.1 and in the future 4G LTE-A

–          […]

By |December 4th, 2013|2013, Business, Companies, Internet|33 Comments
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Why Intel wants to be everyone’s chip maker

intelbrainThis is the first in a series of columns on the strategic direction of several major technology companies that have faltered of late. We’ll start here with Intel, follow in a couple days with Cisco followed by Microsoft, then see where it goes from there.

At Intel’s annual shareholders’ meeting last week the company talked about moving strongly into mobile chips and selling its stillborn OnCue over-the-top video streaming service, but the most important story had to do with expanding Intel’s manufacturing capacity. This latter news is especially important because if you look at the square footage of 14 nanometer fab facilities Intel says it will be bringing online in the next two to […]

By |November 25th, 2013|2013, Companies, Technology|46 Comments
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Try editing your images in the cloud via Mainframe2

This may be the future of computing in the post-PC era. Embedded in this page is a fully functional copy of Adobe Photoshop running in the cloud using the Mainframe2 interface to Amazon Web Services’ EC2 graphical cloud that I mentioned last week and the week before.

You can’t (yet) upload your own pictures to this demo but you can open pre-loaded files and manipulate them as you like. Try it on Windows or Mac using Safari or Chrome for now (more html5 browsers coming including those for Android and iOS). No plugins!  Let me know how it works for you. And remember this application was ported to the cloud in about 10 minutes.

I’ll be […]

By |November 14th, 2013|2013, Breaking News, cloud computing, Software, Technology|79 Comments
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Scarface: He’s got Boris Yeltsin eyes

scarfaceLast Wednesday night I posted my most recent column, turned out the lights in my office, walked down eight stone steps, tripped and smashed my face into the side of our house with a thunk that brought everybody running. Ten stitches and two days later I took the picture you see here in which I look way better. So if anybody wonders why I was a no-show tonight at the Computer History Museum’s reunion for the Homebrew Computer Club, this is my excuse. I can’t see well yet and I sure as heck can’t drive. Woz didn’t make it either I’m told.

I wish I had been at the museum, of course. Those who were […]

By |November 11th, 2013|2013, Books, Companies, Family, Health, history, Uncategorized|49 Comments
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Amazon’s new graphical cloud helps make desktops obsolete

g2_gpu_model_4Amazon Web Services quietly released on Tuesday a pair of new instances on its EC2 cloud computing service. Not just new instances but a whole new type of instance aimed at 2D and 3D graphical computing. For the first time from AWS in a generally available instance, developers and users will have access to virtual machines with GPUs. It’s like putting a PC in the cloud. More properly it is like putting your PC in the cloud. I think this has great disruptive potential. And that means we’ll see similar services coming soon from other cloud providers.

Autodesk must think it has potential, too, because they’ll be offering several applications on the new platform, […]

By |November 6th, 2013|2013, Breaking News, cloud computing, Software|67 Comments
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