Have you heard the one about Apple's data center?

In a few days we’ll be leaving Carolina, possibly forever. Following the recent death of my father-in-law — our reason for coming here in the first place — Silicon Valley calls once more. But before leaving town I was determined to scope out that $1 billion Apple data center in Maiden, NC. So I drove over, took some pictures, and talked to folks at the convenience store down the road. My conclusions from this unscientific research is that the giant Apple facility is mainly empty. It’s a huge building filled more or less with nothing and why Apple built it that way frankly escapes me. Maybe it’s just a shot across the bow of Google and its $650 million data center in South Carolina.

The […]

By |June 28th, 2011|2011|237 Comments
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Intercontinental Ballistic App Store

I’ve been thinking about Apple’s App Store and the industry paradigm shift it represents. Apple loves to change the game like this, simultaneously unseating previously entrenched adversaries while building for itself a defensible system for the future. The trick to making it work is to not appear to be too greedy and I think Apple is accomplishing that. They are greedy, of course, but as Fernando used to say, “It is better to look good than to feel (or be?) good.”

Apple’s original App store was for the iPhone — a portable and for the most part cloud based method of distributing and updating iPhone apps. This was followed by Apple’s App Store for OS X, which did much the same for Macs. Both are […]

By |June 22nd, 2011|2011|123 Comments
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IBM didn't invent the personal computer but they don't know that.

We’ve been away for a few days celebrating Fallon’s fifth birthday in Orlando where the preferred destination has shifted from Disney to Universal Studios, source of all things Harry Potter. While we were away, IBM celebrated its 100th birthday by claiming, among other things, to have invented the personal computer, soiling the legacy of Ed Roberts and pissing-off all real geeks in the process. Here’s a video in which you’ll see IBM’s VP of Innovation innovating his way to this completely bogus claim at the 2:37 milepost.

This sin shall not go unpunished.

Among his milestones IBM’s VP of Innovation completely forgets to mention the company having helped automate the Third Reich.

And while […]

By |June 16th, 2011|2011|127 Comments
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When Engineers Lie

Twenty years ago, when I was writing Accidental Empires, my book about the PC industry, I included near the beginning a little rant about how good engineers were incapable of lying, because their work relied on Terminal A being positive and not negative and if they lied about such things then nothing would ever work. That was before I learned much about data security, where apparently lying is part of the game. Well, based on recent events at RSA, Lockheed Martin, and other places, I think lying should not be part of the game.

Was there a break-in? Was data stolen? Was there an unencrypted database of SecureID seeds and serial numbers? All we […]

By |June 9th, 2011|2011|100 Comments
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iCloud’s real purpose: kill Windows

SteveJobs-300x200

Apple’s announcements yesterday about OS X 10.7 pricing (cheap), upgrading (easy), iOS 5, and iCloud storage, syncing, and media service can all be viewed as increasing ease of use, but from the perspective of Apple CEO Steve Jobs they perform an even more vital function — killing Microsoft.

Here is the money line from Jobs yesterday: “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device – just like an iPad, an iPhone or an iPod Touch. We’re going to move the hub of your digital life to the cloud.”

Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even further and say our data […]

By |June 7th, 2011|2011|428 Comments
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