
Consumer IT Resets the Baseline for Corporate IT
In moving to a BigCo job you quickly notice how different life behind the firewall is when it comes to IT. You’re often more limited than empowered. The advances in consumer IT (things like Facebook and GMail) often have created better IT than corporations provide their employees. For well over a decade, corporate IT has […]

Imperfect substitutes
HP’s PDAs and phones never received management attention. How do I know? Because they relied on off-the-shelf components for everything including software. It indicated that the value to be offered was in “leveraging” (there’s that word again) their brand and distribution. The value of HP was not to build something great–something that required blood, sweat […]

Go Droid – Google Buying Motorola
Clearly, Google is after patent protection in buying Motorola, and they said as much. This leads many to think they’ll sell off the actual hardware assets. That’d be safe and status quo: Google doesn’t make hardware (aside from a couple appliance…

Leaving RedMonk
As Stephen posted earlier this afternoon, I’ll be leaving RedMonk at the end of next week. Working with RedMonk has been easily the best job I’ve had: the trust and mentoring James and Stephen have given me over the years has been more than I could have imagined, and the actual work has been great. […]

Citrix buys Cloud.com – Brief Note
Citrix announced the acquisition of Cloud.com this morning hoping to flesh out its long-running cloud road-map. This Brief Note covers what this means for Citrix and provides some background. Summary There’s some clear motivations for Citrix: Filling whitespace – Citrix has long spoken about cloud computing, but they’ve yet to make a big splash on […]

Despite much hope, PaaS momentum hasn’t blown the doors off yet
Touted at the next thing in cloud, Platform as a Service is receiving much attention now. While PaaS has been far from a failure, it hasn’t been a mega success…yet. I’ve been talking with several people about Platform as a Service use recently: with all the vendors (and us analysts as well!) going on about […]

The Googlebot Wants Everything – #io2011 Trip Report
At the recent Google I/O 2011, the search giant unleashed itself into almost every nook and cranny of IT, consumer and “enterprise.” This positions them against pretty much every vendor out there, and with their billions in money from advertising, they’re like a wealthy but aloof giant that seems to have unlimited resources, just waiting […]

Growing Dell – #SSVE Trip Report
Dell held an analyst event in Austin a couple weeks ago (titled “Services and Solutions for the Virtual Era”, or SSVE), coming out strong with its message of transformation and growth via an expansion in the general “enterprise IT” space. This was primarily based on two, traditionally non-Dell lines of business. The Growth Plan Our […]

It’s a good time to be a software developer
“The exciting convergence of technology consumption and production models” is the topic of the next book Vinnie Mirchandani is working on (his last book had a good, optimistic take on the need for innovation). He recently asked about the role of developers in all that soup – at least I think that’s what he asked. […]

Dell on the path to being more enterprise-y – Day One of the Dell Services and Solutions for the Virtual Era Analyst Event
Yesterday was the first day of the Dell Services and Solutions for the Virtual Era analyst event, nicely for me, in Austin. While there’s a well known consumer and server side to Dell, much of their future-looking life tied up on growing their “enterprise” credentials and offerings. Rather than just selling hardware, Dell wants to […]