61–70 of 73 posts
The irony of this is that all of the "cloud providers" still buy gear from traditional IT vendors like Dell, EMC, HP, and Cisco for their own internal corporate IT. It's the dirty little secret that somehow always gets overlooked when everyone is espousing how we no longer need infrastructure when it can all just "Live in the cloud".
EDIT: why did this get downvoted - am I factually incorrect or you simply disagree and want an echo-chamber?
The irony of this is that all of the "cloud providers" still buy gear from traditional IT vendors like Dell, EMC, HP, and Cisco for their own internal corporate IT. It's the dirty little secret that somehow always gets overlooked when everyone is espousing how we no longer need infrastructure when it can all just "Live in the cloud".
Uh, no. For one example, see: http://www.opencompute.org/
Wtf is this article talking about? Microsoft fucked because they have Windows on 95% of computers? Agh, i'm too exasperated to continue my train of thought. Yes, everybody is fucked because of Facebook and Google and MongoDB.
There's a lot of stupidity here (or perhaps one might charitably call it excessive glee, or even plain old clickbait), but it's been a long time since 95% of computers ran Windows, if that was ever true in the first place. You'd have to start by defining "computer". If we use a technically reasonable but broad in journalism's terms definition of "device containing a CPU with integrated MMU", then we're including ever…
Microsoft are so far from niche it's unreal, and it shows a great ignorance on behalf of the author to look at one product from one arm of a diverse organisation, which has been at the forefront of CS research for decades, has competences that Google et al absolutely do not, and compare it to other companies which only have vague product-line overlap so blithely.
This is ignoring the manufacturing, supply chain management, distribution, retail competences that the other mentioned companies have, which Google and Facebook may never have. It's also ignoring fundamental aspects of marketing such as brand equity, positioning, etc. It's also ignoring the fact that some of these companies are already embedded in industry, via their product line and also via consultancy. Lastly, it's taking a single current snapshot of the industry, and is ignoring the fundamentals of organisational strategy and competition and capitalism, which would suggest that the companies mentioned will adapt and compete to survive (in b4 Innovator's Dilemma). Not all companies will do this successfully, but the companies mentioned will.
It seems like the author is judging these companies via their perception of a small subset of their products, and the market's perception of them (some of their share prices are up and down) without looking at the fundamentals of each business, their diversification strategies, product line strategies, their financial metrics (which the author could've looked up in 10 seconds), and so on.
I mean to suggest that these companies are in trouble because of OSS such as MongoDB, which they have partnered with, support, and sell (and more than likely funded at some point), is very silly, but that's precisely what the author has done.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vblock is a management and communication nightmare. It runs on an independent AD domain with no integration with your own environment. It's just like having your own hardware in your own rack, but you have to call them to fix what you'd just normally fix internally. You have to have people who know VMWare, Cisco, and SAN to run one, more efficient to just set up a vCenter.
You can fix a VBlock yourself quite fine if you stay within its constraints, though the point is to get out of the business of fixing this stuff yourself - it's undifferentiated heavy lifting. Wire and walk away as a transition towards data center zero. Yes theyre isolated by design, but unified management isnt hard to do. I've seen places save tens of millions getting off IBM or EDS outsourcing replaced with converg…
I've been a contractor for a firm that still runs their own mainframe for data transformation, and had Cisco experts on the payroll. They ran their own vCenter instances integrated with their Active Directory, so moving with them to Vblock was painful mostly in giving up control.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a lot of stupidity here (or perhaps one might charitably call it excessive glee, or even plain old clickbait), but it's been a long time since 95% of computers ran Windows, if that was ever true in the first place. You'd have to start by defining "computer". If we use a technically reasonable but broad in journalism's terms definition of "device containing a CPU with integrated MMU", then we're including ever…
I could have saved you some effort. By "computer" I meant "personal computer". I presume that everybody here would understand that I didn't mean "device which can compute", i.e. all servers, cash registers, calculators, difference engines and Turing machines. I'd have thought that this would've been obvious since I said 95% off the top of my head, and your very own link says 91.47%. Microsoft are so far from niche it…
It's not 1992 any more. At the very minimum, it's reasonable to assume that "computer" also includes mobile devices and servers, two additional markets that are well-known to both technical and lay audiences.
> I presume that everybody here would understand that I didn't mean "device which can compute", i.e. all servers, cash registers, calculators, difference engines and Turing machines.
You haven't shown that you know what an MMU is. There's a reason I included that; the definition excludes microcontrollers, devices that lack external memory, and other things that clearly cannot run Windows or any other competing operating system. Most of the devices you mention either don't have CPUs or the CPUs they have don't have MMUs, and they're not part of the Windows addressable market. Since you brought up Windows in the first place, doesn't it make sense to limit ourselves to the general classes of computer on which Windows could conceivably run?
> This is ignoring the manufacturing, supply chain management, distribution, retail competences that the other mentioned companies have, which Google and Facebook may never have.
I didn't mention either company. Both are advertising companies; Facebook doesn't make any kind of product that competes with Windows, and Google's competitor (Android) isn't really its own anyway, as the actual OS is Linux.
> Not all companies will do this successfully, but the companies mentioned will.
I'm not sure why you're going off on me. I explicitly said that Microsoft is likely to remain in business and making money for a very long time. In case it isn't obvious, making money and successful are the same thing. A company can make money serving niche markets, and many do.
> the fundamentals of each business
Microsoft's top product by both revenue and profit is Windows. Windows has a leading market share on only a single class of device (desktops and laptops), and that market itself has been consistently shrinking in each of the last several years (2013: http://b-i.forbesimg.com/anthonykosner/files/2013/04/ChartOf... 2014: http://www.engadget.com/2014/10/08/pc-market-share-q3-2014/ 2015: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3090817). Forecasts are for continued shrinkage of that market. I don't think it's fair or prudent to ignore those fundamentals, as they clearly are central to Microsoft's ability to make money. Azure may be doing well and may even grow into a strong #2 in its space, but it's still less than 10% the size of the market leader and it generated well under a billion dollars of revenue last year (http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2015/04/15/sizing-...), accounting for less than 1% (http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AMSFT&fstype=ii&ei=R...) of the company's total turnover. It's difficult to know if it was profitable, but it hardly matters; the operation is barely even material to the company as a whole. Azure would need to double in size 4 more times to account for 10% of Microsoft's revenue.
Again: I didn't say Microsoft is going to go out of business tomorrow. Or next year or even in 2025. But you should acknowledge that a backward-looking view of the company is risky, and that an objective forward-looking assessment of its business is less rosy than you would make it out to be. At best, the company will be much less dominant than it was in the 90s.
> I mean to suggest that these companies are in trouble because of OSS such as MongoDB
I didn't. As I said, there's a lot of stupidity here. There probably are some small e-commerce and ad companies using Mongo that should be using Postgres or MySQL or Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server, but I don't know that those companies would have gone into business at all if they had to pay an enterprise software vendor for database licenses. I agree that the impact of MongoDB on the named companies' bottom lines has been negligible, and that no evidence of such impact has been offered.
The author and many of the comments here have strayed well into hyperbole, probably fueled in part by ignorance and in part by schadenfreude and glee at seeing some poorly-managed companies in mature markets struggling to remain successful (HP is, after all, the poster child for mismanagement in this space). I don't believe I've made the same error. If you think I have, please provide supporting evidence, as I have provided for my position.
This is such a perception skewed by Silicon-Valley-Syndrome. This is how the rest of the world works -- I run an import/export business and have to manage logistics. It doesn't matter what industry, it could be crude oil or widgets from China at half a penny a piece. It's my job as CIO to choose an implementation. I'm going to choose SAP or Dynamics (or one of the handful of other ERP's with name recognition) on DB2…
I read somewhere that the cloud is just someone's else computer. At least in the business I am working with that would never be allowed so if there is a cloud to be had it will be on premises, which may keep these so-called walking dead lumbering for quite some time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then there is Elon Musk who told his CIO to build their own manufacturing planning system because he refused to give that much money to SAP or Oracle. Ps. Having migrated an SAP off of AIX, I'd say you'd be better served with something like a VBlock or even VirtuStream or Amazon cloud to run it. There also are price and performance incentives to run R/4 on HANA than on Oracle.
Musk isn't worryabout being fired and making his mortgage payments (eve though he once came perilously close to being broke on his liquid investments). Most people charged with making IT decisions are worried about this.
I personally couldn't look myself in the mirror , speaking as a former VP of IT ops at a large company, if I made a decision where the primary concern was for my job stability. In fact, the fact that I could get fired for making the difficult choice usually was a good sign. I'm not talking about making reckless decisions, I'm talking things like firing IBM outsourcing because they're price gouging and risking the inevitable call to our board of directors that is attempting to get me and my boss (the CIO) fired.
That said I do agree many IT people make the decision for their own stability first, and the company second. That usually is due to a poor business leader that promotes a risk averse culture - unlike a Reed Hastings or Elon Musk.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uh, no. For one example, see: http://www.opencompute.org/
And that's proof of what? Opencompute is for building out their clouds, not their internal IT.
