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HP's decision to get out of the PC business has Wall Street voting with a 20% reduction in stock value.
Which leaves an opening for Michael Dell to make some comments on Twitter.
MichaelDell Michael DellGoodbye HP, Sorry you don't want to be in PCs anymore..But we do more than ever. How would you say goodbye to HP?MichaelDell Michael DellIf HP spins off their PC business....maybe they will call it Compaq?
Mark Andreesen of Netscape fame has an essay in the WSJ.
Why Software Is Eating The World
By MARC ANDREESSEN
This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both moves surprised the tech world. But both moves are also in line with a trend I've observed, one that makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the recent turmoil in the stock market.
In short, software is eating the world.
Mark argues that software is dominating industries
The best new movie production company in many decades, Pixar, was a software company. Disney—Disney!—had to buy Pixar, a software company, to remain relevant in animated movies.
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Photography, of course, was eaten by software long ago. It's virtually impossible to buy a mobile phone that doesn't include a software-powered camera, and photos are uploaded automatically to the Internet for permanent archiving and global sharing. Companies like Shutterfly, Snapfish and Flickr have stepped into Kodak's place.
Today's largest direct marketing platform is a software company—Google. Now it's been joined by Groupon, Living Social, Foursquare and others, which are using software to eat the retail marketing industry. Groupon generated over $700 million in revenue in 2010, after being in business for only two years.
Today's fastest growing telecom company is Skype, a software company that was just bought by Microsoft for $8.5 billion. CenturyLink, the third largest telecom company in the U.S., with a $20 billion market cap, had 15 million access lines at the end of June 30—declining at an annual rate of about 7%. Excluding the revenue from its Qwest acquisition, CenturyLink's revenue from these legacy services declined by more than 11%. Meanwhile, the two biggest telecom companies, AT&T and Verizon, have survived by transforming themselves into software companies, partnering with Apple and other smartphone makers.
All of this software goes into data centers, and to grow faster they need to be greener data centers using less energy and reducing the environmental impact.
Data Centers in general obey the infamous Fight Club Rule “You Don Not Talk About Fight Club.” “You Do Not Talk About Data Centers”
Apple has created version of this rule in a T-Shirt.
Apple Souvenir T-Shirt Jokes About Company’s Secrecy
Monday July 11, 2011 2:03 pm PDT by Jordan Golson
This $17 t-shirt sums up most visits to Apple’s corporate headquarters in Cupertino. Available only at Apple’s Company Store, it’s a bit more classy than “I visited Apple HQ and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” — but sends the same message. The shirt reads:I visited the Apple campus. But that’s all I’m allowed to say.
This is too funny and I had to get one. Which is being modeled by not daughter asking, “Dad, why is this funny?”
The guys at 259 Consulting Group have an interesting post on meeting a customer’s SLA from his perspective running SaaS.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The 259 Consulting Group audits, analyzes, and improves your SaaS Infrastructure. We’ll find your next SaaS problem before it finds you. Visit our contact page if you'd like to get in touch.
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Met your SLA? Nobody cares.
Posted by: 259 Consulting Group
A Wise Man once told me that the best I could hope for in the SaaS Infrastructure business is to not have [angry] customers. Customers may agree to a 99.9% SLA but they’re actually upset anytime my service is unavailable.
As the Wise Man put it: “Customers only remember your last outage. Don’t expect roses and a congratulations card when you barely meet your monthly SLA.”
The author uses a “Wise Man’s advice” story to tell his story of enlightenment.
I received the Wise Man’s advice on the heels of a horrible outage for one of my new services. He was right. Forget the 100% uptime over the last six months, the only thing that mattered to my angry customers was the loss of three nines in the current month.
The Wise Man continued with his advice: “If you want to be in the service business, you need to get disciplined about mitigating service interruption.”
That was the day I really got Service Management Religion.
Service Management is a set of activities that ensures your service is available as promised. It’s not a glamorous set of activities but, after that worst outage of my career, I still can’t think of anything more important than ensuring data is never lost and my services are always available.
We define Service Management as the daily management of the following processes:
- Capacity and Demand Management
- SLA Management
- Risk Management
- Knowledge Management
- Compliance Management
- Vendor and Hardware Management
- Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
WSJ reports on HP’s reported spinoff of the PC division.
- Associated Press
As if that weren’t enough, the world’s biggest computer maker also announced fiscal third-quarter earnings and lowered its financial targets for the rest of the year. H-P reported preliminary earnings of 93 cents a share on revenue of $31.2 billion, compared with a profit of 75 cents a share and $30.7 billion in revenue a year earlier.
In a release, the company said it was exploring a spinoff of its PC business as part of a plan to put an “emphasis on enterprise, commercial and government markets.” Expect plenty of questions from Wall Street analysts on that issue in H-P’s earnings conference call, which is set to begin at 5 p.m. Eastern. Digits will be there to live blog.
Bloomberg also reports.
HP Said to Plan Autonomy Purchase, PC Spinoff
Aug. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Hewlett-Packard Co., the world’s largest computer maker, is in talks to buy Autonomy Corp. for about $10 billion and plans to spin off its personal-computer business, people with direct knowledge of the matter said. Autonomy confirmed it is in talks with Hewlett-Packard in a statement. Cory Johnson reports on Bloomberg Television's "Fast Forward." (Source: Bloomberg)
