Posts by tillm

@Wunderbar1, Cannibalization

As they say "if you can't beat them, join them". HP and Dell know exactly that the IT industry is moving quite fast (as compared to most other industries).

IBM tried to "protect" their mainframe and midrange business, only to see competitors such as HP, Compaq, Dell, Microsoft and Intel eat their business alive. IBM certainly had all the skills required to build a 100% PC and to eat their own mainframe business, but the beancounters in Armonk chose their short-term benefits instead of their long-term viability. Now IBM is a kind of "American Tata" with a dying hardware appendix.

All the "PC" companies (from Intel, Microsoft, Seagate to Google and Facebook) are now pushing Computing Forward. IBM had all of these technologies in-house from the RAM chip and the harddisk up to the SQL database server. But they were incapable to make that stuff available to the little guy with few pennies. Oracle, Microsoft, Seagate, Intel and Google were happy to do so and now they own hugely profitable empires while the IBM hardware/systems business is in a process of steady decline. They are even too stupid to properly sell DB/2.

@HP: Provide Quality, Be Loyal To Own Stuff

As the article has stated, it will be difficult to compete with Amazon ON PRICE. But haven't we read lots of stories about AWS being unreliable ?

So HP, try to compete ON QUALITY: Assure competent people run these infrastructure operations, aim for high availability, resilience, proper technological architectures.

Most of your customers will not be web 2.0 startups - they are already comfortable with Amazon. So it will be more "normal" companies who do not want to buy expensive servers just to see it rot at 5% CPU load in some forgotten corner of their datacenter.

Finally, be Loyal To Your Own Creations. If success is initially not phenomenal, don't do the regular HP fuckup of closing down the own product/service and then support some competitor. You killed lots of High Value product lines this way (Allbase SQL, VMS, PA RISC, HPUX (almost)). Take the Larry E approach and drum up your stuff even if it currently does not fly. Loudly announce minor improvements to anybody who listens. A bit of hyperbole never damaged Oracle and Microsoft - but their mute competitors.

Canonical...

From their website:

"We've come a long way since our launch in 2004. We now have over 400 staff in more than 30 countries, and offices in London, Boston, Taipei, Montreal, Shanghai, Sao Paulo and the Isle of Man."

It appears to me that Mr Shuttleworth is a highly skilled businessman and that he would not expand to 400 staffers if he were losing money. I guess he is already raking it in big-time just on the support contracts they have. Or maybe it is the OEM business. But surely he is not subsidizing 400 well-paid people just for the sake of Linux.

Just look at the list of their job openings and it becomes clear that they don't need any advice on how to make money:

https://tbe.taleo.net/NA3/ats/careers/searchResults.jsp?org=CANONICAL&cws=1&act=sort&sortColumn=2&sortColumn=0

Rather, it appears that this is the European Redhat In The Making. Just that they also aim for the hearts of MS and Apple. Mr Shuttleworth is a shrewd guy....

Cloud & Big Old Corporations

..don't mix. At least the super-corpo I am currently working with has an explicit policy of "all data must be inside our perimeter". Which often means on Laptops, as the corporate data center is outrageously expensive.

They would not even allow for storing data strongly encrypted in the cloud. So AWS ? Probably only when they are getting badly squeezed in some kind of nasty downturn. But even then, I doubt it.