Last night I was surfing the web and came across a news story titled Ten Things Americans Waste the Most Money On from a web site called 24/7 Wall Street. I’ll save you the trouble of reading the story: we Americans waste our money (in monetary order from most to least) on restaurants, gifts, audio/video equipment, pets, hotels, entertainment admission fees, alcohol, sporting goods, tobacco, and apparel. Or in other words eating, having family and friends, enjoying music, having a dog or cat, experiencing the world, knocking back a dirty martini, exercising, and replacing our worn-out clothing is a frigging waste of money.
Just shoot me.
If we didn’t spend all that money what would […]
I don’t think Leo Apotheker is going to survive long as CEO of Hewlett Packard. This is not based on any inside information, just my own pondering. And when Apotheker does go down, I’m pretty sure I know who will take his place.
Next week Apple will have a product event, presumably to announce the next generation of MacBook Pro notebooks. Every year we see these upgrades. The notebooks get faster with more storage and every couple years they look a little different. This time, however, there will be another change — the addition of a new type of peripheral data port called Light Peak that promises, at 10 gigabits-per-second — to be the fastest-yet connection between a Mac and a storage device or even from one Mac to another. And this latter use is key because in addition to Light Peak-equipped MacBook Pros, I expect to see next week a Light Peak Mac Mini. Now that’s interesting.
Long before I became involved with technology I worked as a reporter in the Middle East. My work there introduced me to many important characters of that era. Some of them, like Yassar Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization and King Hussein of Jordan, are long gone from the scene. I effectively predated Mubarak, and in those days Bahrain was mainly known as the only place on the Gulf where drivers were polite and you could legally buy a drink. But one constant that remains is Colonel Qaddafi of Libya, though he’s not what this column is about. It’s about Major Jalloud, Qaddafi’s right-hand man.
A longtime reader checked-in today with one more story of Internet generational change. We used to call it just disintermediation, but in its later stages this syndrome requires new consumers who may have never even visited a bookstore… or had to.
President Obama last night had dinner at John Doerr’s house in Silicon Valley and for some reason I wasn’t invited. I wish I had been. Can you imagine Obama making small talk with Steve Jobs? This is an instance where Steve’s lack of an internal censor probably served the event well, or at least I hope it did, because when it comes to the dinner’s goal of stimulating innovation in America every Administration from any political party needs all the help it can get. I should know, because I’ve been working a bit with those White House would-be innovators, trying to get them in the right groove.
Maybe it was that column I wrote recently about AOL buying the Huffington Post, but I swear AOL has turned on me. Share my pain.
When John Sculley forced Steve Jobs out of Apple back in 1985, the former PepsiCo marketing executive very quickly produced dramatic improvements in Apple’s profitability. Apple wasn’t losing money before, but Sculley improved the bottom line by about $200 million (a lot in those days) simply by cutting all of Steve Jobs’s pet projects that appeared to have poor prospects. Sculley raised profits by cutting expenses not by increasing sales. Expect the same thing at Nokia where, ignoring for the moment the “enormous payments” Microsoft will be making according to Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, the company can probably cut its software development budget to near-zero, saving $1 billion or more and increasing profits by that […]
Nokia today announced that the Finnish cellphone company is choosing Windows 7 Phone as the operating system for its future smart phones. It’s not a surprising move given that Nokia CEO Stephen Elop came from Microsoft and it’s not even that risky a move given that the alternative was a slow but certain death for Nokia smart phones running Symbian and Meego. Sure Nokia could have gone with Android, but Google has less at risk than Microsoft so Redmond had much more to offer. The only real question here is whether Nokia can make the new strategy a success? I think they can, but there is only one way to do it — by rushing […]
Digital Equipment Corporation founder and longtime CEO Ken Olsen died this week at 84. I never met Ken Olsen, but I have a sense of him through his products. The first computer I ever programmed was a PDP-1 accessed over an old TTY terminal from my junior high school. At one point in the 1980s I owned a PDP-8 I bought as salvage and installed in my California cellar. Not only did that old PDP-8 give me many hours of fun as I brought it back to life, it also heated my bungalow! So when I think of Ken Olsen, I think of industrial-strength computers.
