Monthly Archives: July 2009

Lowly Highs

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“Bottoms up” is not just something you say during cocktail hour or at a strip club. It is a market strategy as well, and Google will implement it with a fist full of dollar bills. News of a Google netbook operating system – Chrome OS by name – has emerged. Targeted for netbooks running ARM and x86 chips, COS centers Google’s Chrome browser as the interface to the world and to Google applications. This latest Linux distro is designed to address the bottom of the commercial computing market (we’ll ignore the One Laptop per Child gizmos that would otherwise win the Barrel Bottom Scraper Award for underpowered PCs). Scott McNealy understood half the equation when in an over-caffeinated frenzy said “The network is the computer.” Naturally McNealy saw the hardware side of the system, being that he was in the hardware business. But as any technology marketing maven will maintain, … Continue reading →

Solid Move

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It is always fun to see a market tipping point at the moment it occurs. Samsung, the Korean tech titan, is rumored to be exiting the hard drive business for ultra thin notebooks, switching instead to solid state drive (SDD) production. It appears that Hitachi, Fujitsu, Seagate and Western Digital have abandoned that market as well, leaving Toshiba alone to peddle electricity sucking spindles for your groin warmer. When five out of six primary players leave a market, you know that market is toast. Intel is accelerating the switch. They report that as soon as next month they will double the density of their SSDs, pumping in a hefty 160GB into the small form factor. Since SSDs are a relatively new market phenomenon, and since work has only begun on how to bundle more bits into the drives, we can expect Moore’s law to switch from CPU cycles to SSD … Continue reading →