The Smell of Entrepreneurism in the Morning

Today is a great day for I, Cringely and for me. It is the day we launch the special web site for Cringely’s (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour. I wrote a column last month announcing the Tour, which you can read here, but today marks the actual start of this summer’s adventure, because it opens nominations.

Visit the new web site here, but please remember to come back and finish reading this column.

This new web site is strictly for readers to nominate startup companies, discuss them, vote for favorites, then see the results as we come up with the top 24 companies in six different categories.

You have to […]

By |March 2nd, 2010|2010, Uncategorized|141 Comments
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Apple 2010: More of the Same and Blu-Ray, too

Back to my 2010 predictions, this time mainly about Apple, the PC company that fared best in 2009 and is likely to fare best in 2010, too. Though I also wonder at what point we take Apple’s hint and stop thinking of them so much as a computer company?

Over the past years Apple has brought out successively better and ever more solid versions of OS X. They’ve completed a transition from PowerPC to Intel processors that could have killed a lesser company. They’ve built a dominant line of professional apps and a competitive line of productivity apps, pricing them reasonably compared to Microsoft. They re-invented the media player and the smart phone. […]

By |January 12th, 2010|2010, Uncategorized|113 Comments
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New Cringely Posts on AOL

If you care about real estate, politics, or economics, you might find interesting this pair of posts I made this week on AOL’s Housingwatch blog:

http://www.housingwatch.com/2009/12/28/fannie-and-freddie-more-than-politics-as-usual/

http://www.housingwatch.com/2009/12/30/fannie-freddie-ii-the-wrath-of-obama/

By |December 30th, 2009|Uncategorized|41 Comments
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Silence isn't Golden

RF243089Judging from the 70+ reader comments, many from present or former IBM employees, my last column about the arrest of IBM Sr. VP Bob Moffat on insider trading charges hit a nerve.  In a few hours I’ll be posting another column on a completely different topic, but I can’t let this one go without making one more observation.  It has been almost a week since Moffat was arrested and in that time, as far as I can tell, IBM has made no comment on the case to the press or even to its own employees.

Why no comment?  I’ve been wondering that aloud for the last day or two, asking my friends and almost […]

By |October 22nd, 2009|Uncategorized|70 Comments
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No Joy in Mudville

moffatI have no idea whether IBM senior vice-president Bob Moffat is guilty of insider trading or not, though that’s what he was arrested for yesterday.  What I do know is that Moffat’s job since 2005 has been as the architect of IBM’s project called LEAN, which is intended to adjust Big Blue’s global labor force to maximize profitability. I’ve written quite a bit about LEAN, much to the consternation of IBM, characterizing it in large part as a way to replace expensive older American workers with younger and cheaper workers in India and Argentina while cleverly dodging U.S. age discrimination and possibly other civil rights laws.  Whatever the legality of LEAN […]

By |October 17th, 2009|Uncategorized|147 Comments
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