Mineserver Update: We’re not dead yet!

Readers have been clamoring — nay demanding — a Mineserver update, so here it is. The gist of customer complaints is that they feel cheated and under-informed and we’re sorry for that, but please read-on.

This is our 25th update on the Mineserver project. That’s a lot of updates for people who don’t do enough updates. We’ve detailed so far every step and misstep in the project except one, which is coming in the next paragraph. Nothing about those earlier updates has changed or is  incorrect. We’ve learned a lot and we’ve done what we had to do to get to this point.

The major change that has been, to […]

By |May 22nd, 2017|2017, Business, Family|181 Comments
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My first Seeking Alpha post ran today

IMG_0826 (1)I know many readers are tired of my (too) many columns about IBM. So I won’t be posting the latest one here at all. It’s over on the Seeking Alpha investor blog. You can read it here. I mention the post simply because some readers do care about such things.

The Seeking Alpha post is about IBM earnings and how the company is using old business to prop-up new business and not being at all upfront about what’s really happening.

The Seeking Alpha column is also a complaint about blog posts related to earnings in general because they are often written by people who think they know a lot about financial numbers but clearly know […]

By |May 31st, 2016|2016, analytics, Business, Companies, Family, Gadgets, Media|51 Comments
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$99 Mineserver: The Devil is in the Details

IMG_0734You may recall my three sons ran a successful Kickstarter campaign last fall for their $99 Mineserver, a multiuser Minecraft server the size of a pack (not a carton) of cigarettes. On the eve of their product finally shipping here’s an update with some lessons for any complex technical project.

At the time we shot the Kickstarter video my kids already had in hand a functional prototype. Everything seen in the video was real and the boys felt that only producing custom cases really stood in the way of shipping. How wrong they were!

First we needed a mobile app to administer the server so we hired an experienced […]

By |March 17th, 2016|2016, Business, Entrepreneurship, Family, Gadgets|86 Comments
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What’s happening at IBM (it’s dying)

Corporate-Life-CycleThis is a column I didn’t want to write. Like many of you I am tired of IBM stories and the company that was once an industry leader has become, at best, a poster child for how not to manage the later stages of a corporate life cycle. But because what’s happening at IBM is also happening right now at hundreds of other big technology companies makes it worth covering. So let me be clear: IBM is dying.

Last week a huge round of layoffs hit IBM just as I predicted back in January. The company is releasing as few details as possible. Nobody, for example, knows exactly how big […]

By |March 8th, 2016|2016, Business, Companies, Industry, Predictions|149 Comments
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Final Prediction #10: Apple will buy Dish Network

2016predictionsA third of the people who read this column don’t live in the USA so maybe this prediction isn’t interesting to them, but I think Apple will buy Dish Network, the American direct satellite TV broadcaster. It’s the only acquisition that will give Apple the kind of entry point they want into the TV business, allowing Cupertino to create overnight an over-the-top (OTT) Internet streaming video service — effectively an Internet cable system.

Buying Dish would be a bold move for Apple because all the benefits Cupertino seeks aren’t obviously available. True, Dish has 14 million U.S. subscribers (I am one of those) who get 100+ channels of TV from the sky. True, Dish […]

By |January 22nd, 2016|2016, Business, entertainment, Internet, Media, Predictions, strategy|59 Comments
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