An IT labor economics lesson from Memphis for IBM

My recent series of columns on troubles at IBM brought me many sad stories from customers burned by Big Blue. I could write column after column just on that, but it wouldn’t be any fun so I haven’t. Only now a truly teachable lesson has emerged from a couple of these horror tales and it has to do with U.S. IT labor economics and immigration policy. In short the IT service sector has been shoveling a lot of horse shit about H1B visas.

The story about H1B visas is simple. H1B’s are given for foreign workers to fill U.S. positions that can’t be filled with qualified U.S. citizens or by permanent U.S. residents who hold green cards. H1Bs came into existence because there weren’t enough […]

By |June 14th, 2012|2012, Business, Computing, Outsourcing, Software, Technology|162 Comments
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Death of the Mac Pro

I know I promised a third part in my crowdfunding series but the first two parts have generated a lot of backchannel discussions that have put part three in a bit of flux. We have a chance to do something really amazing here so please give me another day or so and I promise to be back with something fun to read in part three. In the meantime there was something I found especially interesting about Apple’s announcements yesterday….

Not all of Apple’s new and upgraded products were even mentioned in yesterday’s WWDC keynote. I was especially interested in Apple’s tower computer, the Mac Pro, which was yesterday both upgraded and killed at the same time.

The […]

By |June 12th, 2012|2012, Breaking News, Computing, Technology|71 Comments
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IPv6 rollout is a yawner (that’s good!)

Yesterday 3000 important web sites including Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Yahoo as well as many top Internet Service Providers turned on their IPv6 support and this time they left it turned on. Nothing happened. Or maybe I should say nothing bad happened, which is good, very good.

The world is quickly running out of new IPv4 addresses with almost 3.7 billion issued. There are two workarounds: 1) complicate the net further with cascading arrays of Network Address Translation (NAT) servers that slow things down, inhibit native inbound connections like VoIP, and defeat location services both good and bad, or; 2) move to IPv6 with 128-bit addresses (IPv4 is 32-bit) that would allow giving an IPv6 address […]

By |June 7th, 2012|2012, Computing, Internet|25 Comments
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The dumbing down of Windows 8

Beta versions of Windows 8 this week lost their nifty Aero user interface, which Microsoft’s top user interface guy now calls “cheesy” and “dated,” though two weeks ago he apparently loved it. Developers are scratching their heads over this UI flatification of what’s supposed to become the world’s most popular operating system. But there’s no confusion at my house: Aero won’t run on a phone.

Look at the illustration to the left. It shows projected growth in Internet devices.  Keep in mind while reading this that a PC lasts at least three years, a phone lasts 18 months and nobody knows yet how long the average tablet will be around but I’ll guess two […]

By |May 30th, 2012|2012, Business, Companies, Computing, Gadgets, Technology|88 Comments
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