Dell buys EMC and gets the corporate cloud for free

emccloudThe Wall $treet Journal carried a story last week about Dell Computer possibly buying EMC, the big storage vendor, and this morning the New York Times confirmed it, pinning a price of $65 billion on the deal. There’s a lot to wonder about in this combination, which I think is pretty brilliant on Dell’s part even if I’m not generally in favor of mega-mergers. But it seems to me most of the experts commenting on the deal have it ass-backwards as Wall Street once again proves it doesn’t really understand technology business.

EMC has this large but aging storage division and a valuable subsidiary in VMware, of which EMC owns 80 percent. Activist investors […]

By |October 12th, 2015|2015, Business, cloud computing, Companies, Industry|30 Comments
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Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine

BobBellevilleCriesAlex Gibney’s Steve Jobs documentary is available now in some theaters, on Amazon Instant Video and, ironically, on iTunes. It’s a film that purports to figure out what made Steve Jobs tick. And it does a lot, just not that.

I’m not a dispassionate reviewer here. More than a year before Jobs died I tried to hire Alex Gibney to make a Steve Jobs film with me. At that point he suggested I be the director, that he’d coach me (“It’s not that hard,” the Oscar-winner claimed.) We talked and met but didn’t come to a deal. Later Gibney decided to do a Jobs film on his own — this film — and […]

By |September 16th, 2015|2015, Companies, entertainment, Industry, Media, Movies, People|56 Comments
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Evil Google waiting on line one

telephoneLately I have been getting telephone calls from Google. Do you get them, too? The numbers they come from are in many different cities but the callers always ask to speak to the business owner (that’s me) so I can claim my business listing and my free web site from Google. But I don’t want a business listing and I don’t need a free web site, I explain. Please take my name off your list. Then they tell me the first of many lies: “We can’t take you off our list.”

Resistance is futile.

Actually the script varies a little and sometimes they say “we won’t take you off,” not “we can’t […]

By |September 7th, 2015|2015, Business, Companies, Industry, Internet, Public Relations|145 Comments
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Google’s OnHub router may save WiFi from itself

OnHubGoogle this week introduced its first WiFi router and my initial reaction was “Why?” WiFi access points and home routers tend to be low-margin commodity products that could only hurt financial results for the search giant. What made it worth the pain on Wall Street, then, for Google to introduce this gizmo? And then I realized it is Google’s best hope to save the Internet… and itself.

WiFi is everywhere and it generally sucks. WiFi has become the go-to method of networking homes and even businesses. I remember product introductions in New York back in the 80s and 90s when we were told over and over again that it cost $100 per […]

By |August 21st, 2015|2015, Companies, Gadgets, Internet, mobile technology, Product Development, Technology|123 Comments
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IBM is so screwed

I’ve been working on a big column or two about the Office of Personnel Management hack while at the same time helping my boys with their Kickstarter campaign to be announced in another 10 days, but then IBM had to go yesterday and announce earnings and I just couldn’t help myself. I had to put that announcement in the context you’ll see in the headline above. IBM is so screwed.

Below you’ll see the news spelled-out in red annotations right on IBM’s own slides. The details are mainly there but before you read them I want to make three points. First, IBM’s sexy new businesses (cloud, analytics, mobile, social and security or CAMSS) aren’t growing — and probably won’t be growing — […]

By |July 21st, 2015|2015, Big Data, Breaking News, cloud computing, Companies, Industry, mobile technology, Privacy and Security, Social Media|167 Comments
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