This is my promised third column in a series about the effect of H-1B visa abuse on U.S. technology workers and ultimately on the U.S. economy. This time I want to take a very high-level view of the problem that may not even mention words like “H-1B” or even “immigration,” replacing them with stronger Anglo-Saxon terms like “greed” and “indifference.” The truth is that much (but not all) of the American technology industry is being led by what my late mother would have called “assholes.” And those assholes are needlessly destroying the very industry that made them rich. It started in the 1970s when a couple of obscure academics created a creaky logical […]
The U.S. computer industry is dying and I’ll tell you exactly who is killing it and why
Disney’s IT troubles go beyond H-IBs
Disney has been in the news recently for firing its Orlando-based IT staff, replacing them with H-1B workers primarily from India, and making severance payments to those displaced workers dependent on the outgoing workers training their foreign replacements. I regret not jumping on this story earlier because I heard about it back in March, but an IT friend in Orlando (not from Disney) said it was old news so I didn’t follow-up. Well now I am following with what will eventually be three columns not just about this particular event but what it says about the U.S. computer industry, which is not good.
First we need some context for this […]
Autodesk’s John Walker explained HP and IBM in 1991
One reader of this column in particular has been urging me to abandon for a moment my obsession with IBM and look, instead, at his employer — Hewlett Packard. HP, he tells me, suffers from all the same problems as IBM while lacking IBM’s depth and resources. And he’s correct: HP is a shadow of its former self and probably doomed if it continues to follow its current course. I’ve explained some of this before in an earlier column, and another, and another you might want to re-read. More of HP’s problems are covered in a very fine presentation you can read here. Were […]
Sadie’s Apple Watch Arrived Two Weeks Early
This is Sadie the Dog wearing her new Apple Watch. The watch actually belongs to my young and lovely wife, Mary Alyce, but she was unwilling to be photographed this morning while Sadie will pose anytime, anywhere. This is the Sport model of the Apple Watch in space gray with a black band. What makes this picture interesting is the watch was delivered last Friday two weeks early.
I ordered the watch on the first day Apple was taking orders but didn’t do so in the middle of the night so I missed the first batch of watches that were delivered in April. It was promised for delivery June first. Since then there have been stories about […]
AWS shows Cloud is NOT a high-margin business
Last week Amazon.com was the first of the large cloud service companies other than Rackspace to finally break out revenue and expenses for its cloud operation. The market was cheered by news that Amazon Web Services (AWS) last quarter made an operating profit of $265 million with an operating profit margin of 19.6 percent. AWS, which many thought was running at break-even or possibly at a loss, turns out to be for Amazon a $5 billion business generating a third of the company’s total profits. That’s good, right? Not if it establishes a benchmark for typical-to-good cloud service provider performance. In fact it suggests that some companies — IBM […]
