The past couple weeks have been a huge adventure for my family and me as we ran from the Santa Rosa fires. We spent the first week on the Mendocino coast where there are no computer stores. You can get a computer fixed, but can’t buy a new one in Gualala, Mendocino, or Ft. Bragg. So I bought an ancient IBM ThinkPad from MacDaddy Computer Repair only to learn that it wouldn’t produce text I could read. Hence the delay in filing this column — the first of two on the current state of cloud computing. The second column will appear sometime before Thursday when I have scheduled cataract surgery on both eyes. Provided nothing goes horribly wrong I should be back […]
Soylent Green — Now Made with More Women!
Soylent Green is the punchline of a bad joke told to me at the breakfast table by Channing, my 13 year-old son, but in a way it is fitting for this column about women executives in danger of being chewed-up by their corporate machines. And kudos to you if you caught the reference to Edward G. Robinson’s final film — about an over-populated world where people are recycled into cookies.
First up is Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, whom I’m told is rapidly losing the support of her hand-picked board. Mayer, who is expecting twins, will probably not be returning from her upcoming maternity leave and Wall Street has begun speculating about possible successors. […]
Dell buys EMC and gets the corporate cloud for free
The Wall $treet Journal carried a story last week about Dell Computer possibly buying EMC, the big storage vendor, and this morning the New York Times confirmed it, pinning a price of $65 billion on the deal. There’s a lot to wonder about in this combination, which I think is pretty brilliant on Dell’s part even if I’m not generally in favor of mega-mergers. But it seems to me most of the experts commenting on the deal have it ass-backwards as Wall Street once again proves it doesn’t really understand technology business.
EMC has this large but aging storage division and a valuable subsidiary in VMware, of which EMC owns 80 percent. Activist investors […]
