Apple knows 5G is about infrastructure, NOT mobile phones

With Apple shares down more than 20 percent from their all-time highs of only a few weeks ago, writers are piling-on about what’s wrong in Cupertino. But sometimes writers looking for a story don’t fully understand what they are talking about. And that seems to me to be the case with complaints that Apple is too far behind in adopting 5G networking technology in future iPhones. For all the legitimate stories about how Apple should have done this or that, 5G doesn’t belong on the list. And that’s because 5G isn’t really about mobile phones at all.

Just to get this out of the way, I see Apple […]

Cloud Computing May Finally End the Productivity Paradox

One of the darkest secrets of Information Technology (IT) is called the Productivity Paradox. Google it and you’ll learn that for at least 40 years and study after study it has been the case that spending money on IT — any money — doesn’t increase organizational productivity. We don’t talk about this much as an industry because it’s the negative side of IT. Instead we speak in terms of Return on Investment (ROI), or Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). But there is finally some good news: Cloud computing actually increases productivity and we can prove it.

The Productivity Paradox doesn’t claim that IT is useless, by the way, just that […]

A nanotechnology overnight sensation 30 years in the making!

I’m not dead yet!

Fallon and I continue our collaboration, though who knows what I’ll do when he starts back to school on Tuesday? With Mama now working and me blind the kids will be going to school by Uber.

Fortunately, we have something very interesting to write about today that will likely change every technology we currently use.

One of my favorite mad scientists sent me a link recently to a very important IEEE paper from Stanford. Scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) have managed to observe in real time the growth of nanocrystalline superlattices and report that they can grow impressively […]

Bob’s Big Picture technology predictions for 2017

2016-17I couldn’t put it off any longer so here are my technology predictions for 2017. I’ve been reading over my predictions from past years and see a fundamental change in structure over that time, going from an emphasis on products to an emphasis on companies. This goes along, I’d say, with the greater business orientation of this column. That makes sense with a maturing market and mature industries and also with the fact that a fair number of readers are here mainly as investors, something that didn’t used to be so much the case.

Of course we begin with a look at my predictions from a year ago to see how I did. Almost nobody in […]

Saving the Internet of Things (IoT)

screen-shot-2016-11-17-at-12-10-00-amThis is my promised column on data security and the Internet of Things (IoT). The recent Dyn DDoS attack showed the IoT is going to be a huge problem as networked devices like webcams are turned into zombie hoards. Fortunately I think I may have a solution to the problem. Really.

I’m an idiot today, but back in the early 1990’s I ran a startup that built one of the Internet’s earliest Content Distribution Networks (CDN), only we didn’t call it that because the term had not yet been invented. Unlike the CDNs of today, ours wasn’t about video, it was about the daily electronic delivery of PDF editions of […]