2014 Jun 27

Micros Matters

For those who missed the news, Oracle is making its biggest acquisition since it picked up Sun Microsystems - and one wonders what it has done with the chip/server/OS manufacturer since - in 2009 for $7.4BN. Oracle is acquiring Micros Systems for $5.3BN. Micros? Who is that? Unlike the acquiring company, Oracle, whose name is well-known in general markets both as a tech icon and due to its very public founder/CEO Larry Ellison, and last acquisition Sun Microsystems, yet another tech icon and whose CEO also spoke with, shall we say, some flair, Micros is almost completely unknown by the general public.

2014 Jun 25

Open the Kimono

Personally, I am not a big Microsoft services user. I use Google Apps (email and online collaboration), iCloud (Apple), Dropbox (documents) and WordPress (blogging), and while I do use Microsoft software when relevant - Word, PowerPoint, Excel - and am grateful for the near-ubiquitous Exchange protocol, I do not use their cloud services very much. But many millions of people - and businesses - do. So when Microsoft has an extended outage of 12 hours for the single most important service available for any business or person nowadays - email - as they did earlier this week, the level of trust they will receive for the future depends on their level of openness.

2014 Jun 20

The Oracle of Doom

I definitely will not be the first oracle to see a rocky future for Oracle, nor will I be the last. But the last quarter's results, released on Thursday, are particularly troubling. In short: Oracle's enterprise on-premise software business - Oracle's core - is simply flat. It did $3.769MM in revenue in 4Q2013... and $3.769MM in revenue in 4Q2014. It hasn't budged. Sure, its expenses for those sectors may have gone down slightly, but for all intents and purpose, it is no longer a growth engine.

2014 Jun 17

Does Architecture Matter?

Does a good technology architecture matter for a technology firm? Perhaps the better question is, when does it matter? The technologies that have developed as a direct result of the IT developments of the 90s and the Web developments of 2000s - scaling out instead of up, commodity hardware, loose coupling, statelessness, noSQL, map-reduce, etc. - have all had a huge impact on what it costs and how long it takes to build, deliver and maintain software and services.

2014 Jun 16

Airplane Thins

Every business tries very hard to find ways to serve the same number of customers at the same level of quality for the same (or lower) cost. After all, if I can sell you a book for $10, and my marginal cost is $6, or I can find a way to sell you the exact same book with the exact same shipping policies and the exact same experience for $5, well, my profit just went up.

2014 Jun 12

Starbucks Strikes Again... Wirelessly!

Just under a year ago, I wrote how Starbucks and Apple drove adoption of WiFi. I also wrote that Starbucks was considering adopting, in its coffee shops, one of the competing wireless inductive charging standards, PMA, and not alternatives like Qi. This is reminiscent of the old Beta vs. VHS wars in the 80s, and Blu-Ray vs. HD a few years ago. In the end, someone with enough weight and enough network impact selects one, and it locks it in.

2014 Jun 5

Mobile USA

In Mary Meeker's just released 2014 "Internet Trends" report, there is a very interesting trend which I do not recall seeing in her previous reports. From 2005-2014, over a period of 10 years - a decade of significant growth of manufacturing offshore outsourcing, although there is a small shift back towards domestic with the improvements in robotics - one major element's manufacture, perhaps the most important one, is now almost completely domestic: mobile operating system.

2014 Jun 3

When Advertising Is Entertaining

Generally, commercials are, well, boring. They interrupt the entertainment we really came to watch. Sure, some percentage of ads are good, actually are worth watching, but they generally are expensive and represent a small percentage of ads. If you are lucky, you are personally friendly with an advertising creative genius like my friend Ari Merkin, and regularly get to see truly brilliant advertisements, like Elf Yourself, Ikea Lamp, Chrismahanukwanzakah, and on and on.

2014 Jun 2

Lock the Door First

Two reports came out this week that reflect the poor (and weakening) state of security in technology. The first report is the 2014 edition of Mary Meeker's annual KPCB "Internet Trends" report, which I always recommend reading. On slide 18, she states that, "+95% of networks... compromised in some way," and "vulnerable systems on the Internet are compromised within 15 minutes." The same automation software that enables vacuums to move around the house, Google Maps / Waze to find alternate routes, and Chef to maintain consistent server state, let alone Google to scan and index the Internet, enables criminals to find and probe your deployment within less than an hour of it being deployed, even before anyone knows about it.

2014 May 30

Selling Inside Social Media

I had an interesting experience yesterday. Simon Wardley, whom I have mentioned before as one of the best technology strategists I have read and spoken with, tweeted the following about cloud services: Red Hat, Rackspace, HP and many many others are simply being outplayed. They all have great engineers and hopeless generals. — swardley (@swardley) May 28, 2014 I responded by asking for another write-up from Simon - I never tire of reading his analyses of technology in general and cloud in particular - but also responded that I was just now in the process of looking for a cloud offering to host a small mission-critical Web service, and agreed, once again, first-hand, with his thoughts.