Jeff Bezos Can’t Lose

Big technology companies have been recently coming under increased scrutiny from federal regulators. Several tech companies are reportedly under investigation, but this column is only about Amazon, which seems to be in regulatory crosshairs in part because President Trump doesn’t like Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns one of Trump’s least-favorite newspapers, the Washington Post. Ironically, Trump’s goal of breaking-up Amazon would only make Jeff Bezos at least $35 billion richer.

It’s simple: Amazon is worth a lot more in pieces than it is as a single company.

Bezos is no fool, so he knows […]

By |May 11th, 2020|2020, Business, cloud computing, Companies, e-commerce, Economy, Government, Internet, investing, strategy|99 Comments
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Not Just the End of IT, the End of IT Contractors

Earlier this week I predicted the demise of conventional IT caused by the wide adoption of SD-WAN and SASE, accelerated by the emergency demands of everyone working from home. Now that Congress has passed a $2.2 trillion COVID-19 bail-out, let’s throw-in the implications of that legislation to see what effect it is all likely to have on what used to be IT. The short version is to expect an even bigger bloodbath as IT employees at all levels are let go forever. Please understand that some version of this bloodbath was going to happen anyway. What matters right now is how we respond to it.

While my previous column was generally about […]

By |March 30th, 2020|2020, cloud computing, computer networks, Predictions, strategy|42 Comments
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2020 Brings the Death of IT

My new column is below, so don’t forget to read it, but now for something completely different…

I’m running two virtual panels this week as part of Anina.net’s Digital Online Fashion Summit. Anina’s the pretty girl next to me on the top of this page. She lives in Beijing and this will be a global event.

Digital Fashion Online Summit
March 28th – 29th, 2020

A two-day online event for fashion brands, marketing managers, product directors, and online strategists. Speeches are starting at 10 AM and running all day every hour. Join us online at http://digitalfashion.360fashion.net

Learn from top fashion and technology experts which technologies to invest in to bring your brand online and […]

By |March 25th, 2020|2020, cloud computing, Internet, mobile technology, Predictions, strategy, Technology|88 Comments
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2019 Predictions #2 and #3 — A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) shakeout and legal trouble for AWS

Prediction #2 — And then there were only 3.5 VPC Cloud players.  Cloud computing will continue to grow in 2019 with the key term being not Public Cloud, Private Cloud or Hybrid Cloud — which are all so 2018 — but Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Virtual Private Cloud is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) invention but all the AWS competitors seem to be embracing the idea.

What has developed is that the VPC solution based on Open Source using Linux will change the Internet-as-a-Service (IaaS) Cloudscape to VPC-only during 2019.   

Gartner has certainly embraced it. Here’s a 2018 Magic Quadrant chart showing how Gartner sees the segment shaping-up. The first […]

By |March 7th, 2019|2019, cloud computing, Predictions|82 Comments
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Kai-Fu Lee’s new book says Artificial Intelligence will be Google vs China and will kill half the world’s jobs

Kai-Fu Lee was born in Taiwan but grew up in Tennessee, which is nothing — nothing — like Taiwan or China. His PhD is from Carnegie-Mellon and for the first half of his career Lee was “that voice recognition guy” first at Apple, then Microsoft, then Google. Lee took Google to China the first time (a new Google China effort is starting just now). Today Lee is an Artificial Intelligence expert who runs a $1 billion venture fund with offices in Taipei and Beijing and, according to Anina (the pretty girl in the picture with me who has lived in Beijing for most of the last decade) he’s “an absolute technology rock star […]

By |August 31st, 2018|2018, Artificial Intelligence, cloud computing, Economy, Intellectual Property|86 Comments
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