This 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 […]
This came in today from an IBM customer. Sure enough, as of this morning he’s correct:
Readers love predictions so for 15 years or so I’ve been making lots of them during the first full week of each new year. The first time I did a predictions column it was because I couldn’t think of anything else to write about that day and the reaction from readers was so strong that I’ve been stuck doing them ever since. What started as one column per year filled with about 10 predictions has expanded over time to as many as 10 separate predictions columns because as I age I am becoming ever more long-winded. Sorry. It’s reached the point this year where this introductory column won’t even contain predictions, just a […]
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.
Earlier this year two different research reports came out describing the overall cloud computing market and Amazon’s role in it. Synergy Research Group saw Amazon as by far the biggest player (bigger in fact than the next four companies combined) with about 30 percent market share. But Gartner, taking perhaps a more focussed view of just the public cloud, claimed Amazon holds 82 percent of the market with cloud capacity that’s 10 times greater than all the other public cloud providers combined. I wonder how these disparate views can be possible describing the same company? And I wonder, further, whether this means Amazon actually has a cloud monopoly?
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