Monthly Archives: April 2010

HP Handsets

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Just keep reminding yourself that Compaq was an odd deal too. Today Hewlett Packard palmed Palm for whopping $1.2B, or about 1/10th of HP’s petty cash.  This was newsworthy for many reasons including the fact that Palm’s struggling handset line will now join HP’s struggling handset line (bet you forgot that HP makes cell phones — so did the rest of the market).  In a world where RIM owns the corporate market, Apple owns the consumer market, Microsoft hasn’t helped HP’s market, and Google/Android are changing the rules of the market, this marriage seems slightly more absurd than half of Hollywood hook-ups. The deal is not without upside.  First, the market for mobile is not yet saturated.  Especially on the low end, there is plenty of green field. As unlocked handsets become more prevalent and popular, HP can use its retail savvy to shove cell phones into public ears.  I … Continue reading →

Stack ‘Em

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So, when will Oracle buy Brocade? Well, they might buy Juniper, Alcatel or maybe even pick-up Nortel on a distress sale, but I’m pretty sure they will jump on Brocade to secure their data center dominance. Several vendors have been assembling stacks in attempts to become one-stop shopping centers for CTOs.  Cisco shocked many by getting into the server business, HP by buying 3Com, and Oracle buying Sun and not realizing the mess they had gotten themselves into.  IBM is oddly the laggard, evidently content to rake in huge margins on services instead. But IBM may well buy what Oracle doesn’t. Let’s ignore applications, if for no other reason than to give Larry Ellison a reason to panic and read this blog.  The major components of the data center infrastructure stack include servers, storage, operating systems, management suites and networking.  HP has all of the above, and wedding ProCurve, 3Com … Continue reading →

Fretting Flash

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Listening to Hugo Chavez or Steve Jobs is becoming eerily similar. Dictators have some common but not commonly endearing traits.  They tend toward being monomaniacal, focused fiercely on their perception of order.  Anything or anyone that denies the beauty of their utopian vision challenges authority, and can later be found swinging from trees without needing to use their arms or legs. Jobs is trying to string-up Adobe, and in the end might make Apple look like Il Duce on his last day. For folks fond of the Silicon Valley geek gladiators — visionary founders who see business as war and as life — the latest rattling of cyber sabers comes from Apple and Adobe, with Apple’s insistence that Adobe Flash be banished from Jobs’ walled garden of iEverything.  Certain slurs have been sounded, including an odd instance by Jobs proclaiming that Adobe Flash was bug ridden. Jobs is obviously not … Continue reading →

Mobile Movement

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The mighty fall, upstarts rise, and nothing is guaranteed. Comscore published their periodic post of positioning between portable platform providers (tell me when you get sick of my constant alliteration … it won’t stop me, but I do like the feedback).  Of interest are instances where major players are advancing, retreating, or showing signs of stagnation.  In Comscore’s latest totable techno tout sheet we see: RIM:        42.1% rising slowly (+1.3) Apple:      25.4% stagnant (-0.1) Microsoft:  15.1% falling fast (-4.0) Google:     9.0% and rising fast (+5.2) Palm:       5.4% and sinking (-1.8) Most noteworthy and yet most predictable is Microsoft’s plummeting while everyone else is either growing or staying steady.  Microsoft’s mobile operating system has been derided, insulted, defamed and dismissed by many, for sound reasons.  Unlike competing platforms, one routinely needs to buy a new handset whenever Microsoft releases a new OS (I say this with my tongue buried deeply into … Continue reading →