Barker Bites Back
A look at some newsy stuff and interesting bits as well as those hopefully amusing byways of technology.
Wednesday 30 January 2008, 4:22 PM
Bill Gates says farewell in London
Bill Gates has often courted controversy in the past but these days he avoids it whenever possible. But, wherever he goes in the world, it is likely that relics of his misspent youth, making as much money for his company as he reasonably or unreasonably can, will continue to haunt him.
So on Wednesday as Bill said goodbye to Britain and British business at the Institute of Directors (IoD) in London, it was noticeable that it was he himself who brought up an old sore. When asked by his IoD host what advice he had for those who were starting off in business now he said it was this first: “Try not to get sued by the Government, especially not your own Government.” That was point number one.
As a joke we had heard it before, but any good comedian knows that just because a joke is old, that does not mean you can’s use it again.
The joke reflected the mood of the occasion, Bill Gates was on his farewell tour and of course no-one who had been invited was too willing to miss it.
For the most part, he stuck to the familiar themes. The brilliance of technology and what you can do with it. Does that mean you can make a difference in the third world? Bill thinks so. He has a multi-billion dollar fortune to dispose of and, he made clear, that is where the money is going – to innovations that can make a difference.
Someone asked how much of his fortune that he and his wife had committed to their foundation, with an implication that they would be holding something back somehow. Far form berating the questioner for not understanding how the fund worked (as Bill most certainly would have done a few years ago) he just quietly pointed out that there was a large amount in the fund and he and his wife would close it down when it was all spent in about 20 years.
By then, Bill believes, it would have done its job and made a difference to the poor and, especially, sick of the world.
The IoD is a hard-edged forum, but as I looked around you could see that they were sharing his belief. After all, if you cannot make a difference with money what is it for?
Bill also demo-ed Microsoft’s latest plaything, Microsoft Surface. He believe that can make a difference too but it is difficult to know how a £2,000 device can do that.
But I must say that thanks to Bill, I am starting to think about it.
Did a rare trip to see Bill Gates in action change my view of the great man. Not really. After 20 years of Microsoft IT that was unlikely to work for me. The nice thing about Bill is that with a few more years in the business than I could claim, he still so obviously likes this stuff.
So goodbye Bill and yes, we will miss you.
(What’s that? My computer has crashed, again! Argggh! BILL!)
Thursday 10 January 2008, 5:15 PM
HP and energy claims raise questions
HP becomes the latest company to make ambitious pledges of energy reduction this week. It says it plans to reduce energy use in its volume desktops and PCs by 25 percent by the year 2010.
Well it is an ambitious claim. Cutting consumption by a quarter is a great headline figure and one that various media outlets took from HP and followed.
But you don’t have to look very far in HP’s small print to spot the issue here. In fact note one of the footnotes (naturally positioned right at the end of the piece) says quite clearly:
“By 2010, HP plans to reduce the energy consumption of volume desktop and notebook PC families by 25 percent, relative to 2005.”
Ah. So HP is says not that it is reducing consumption by 25 percent in the next three years (2008 to 2010) but instead over six years (2005 to 2010).
Obviously it was never HP’s intention to mislead on this, surely? So when it writes “today …HP committed to reduce the energy consumption of its volume desktop and notebook PC families by 25 percent by 2010” the company knew it meant five years, did it not? Or perhaps it means that it aims to lose the 25 percent ON TOP OF any savings made in the last few years. As the company, like others, has spent the last few years trying to find ways to introduce energy savings I am sure it will.
Tuesday 6 November 2007, 11:28 PM
The battle for digital mapping starts
Tele Atlas is not a particularly large company working in a somewhat specialist field, but its upcoming sale has prompted a bidding war. A leader in the in-car navigation field, TomTom, has come in with a bid to buy the company believed to be around $2.6bn. Now another navigation systems company, Garmin, has put in a bid which could be around $3.3bn.
Tele Atlas’s last set of figures showed turnover of about €315m. What is the big attraction that sees such a high valuation? Well, if there are any crown jewels at stake here it is those in the hands of Tele Atlas and they are the maps.
The company is one of the leaders in digital mapping. It has been involved in digital mapping for the past 20 years and in that time has built considerable intellectual property in the maps themselves which it makes a specialty of chronicling accurately and rendering into equally accurate digital pictures. How good is it? You can tell that by the companies that use it. Customers for its technology include our own Ordinance Survey and the leaders in French digital mapping, Via Michelin.
Not bad for a small company based in Gent, in the Flemish part of Belgium.
Tele Atlas was one of the companies I visited on Tuesday, as part of a tour of Flanders courtesy of Flanders Investment and Trade, the Government sponsored body seeking to increase investment in this corner of Belgium.
Tele Atlas is a particularly buoyant company. The boss of the company, CEO, Alan De Taeye, is not unnaturally a buoyant man at the moment, seeking to weigh up the relevant merits of two very enticing offers. But he is keeping tight-lipped about which way he is leaning.
Tuesday 30 October 2007, 12:49 PM
SNW offers the frights...
And so to Frankfurt and Storage Networking World 2007 by way a visiting HP and so the week starts. The storage industry is enjoying a boom currently thanks to the requirement for IT managers to keep everything. With the possibility of being sued any time by any company for no good reason at all, everyone is keeping everything, or at least all their data. Result? Loads and loads more kit being bought to the benefit of EMC, IBM, HP and every other supplier with any kind of storage product.
So the organisers of SNW are predicting somewhere in the region of 2000 people at this show. And I can believe that.
The theme of the show is very much on that vexed subject known as compliance. I say “vexed” as I still have a bee in my bonnet about the use of the world compliance but I will let that pass for now.
Compliance is the only game in town and that is most certainly where the money is.
Take, the keynote from Andy Monshaw, general manager of IBM storage, and thus a man who is very much in a position to know. He spent his allotted 30 minutes, or whatever, listing all the security, compliance, threats and related issues that are currently making the jobs of most IT manager a cause for concern.
Now, there is an argument that suggests that it is absolutely the right thing to do to frighten IT managers into sorting out their issues. They need shaking up say some. Especially analysts.
The counter argument says that IT companies just smell the money. After a couple of days working in this area, I think they might have a point. Thanks for the warning Andy, but ho easy on the trowel, eh?
Friday 14 September 2007, 9:19 AM
Fun with Dell and HP
There is some rivalry between these two systems giant, which was apparent this week.
The fun started last week when HP invited the press to a meeting about a new system targeted at SMEs to take place last Wednesday. Then Dell told journalists that it was inviting press to a meeting this Monday just gone. Low and behold, HP then cancelled the meeting and re-scheduled it for the Wednesday, the 12th. Was this the two companies trying to steal a march on each other?
The answer appears to be yes for low and behold, the two companies announced, more or less, directly competing systems with a targeted price within a few pounds of each other and, surprise, surprise, HP is slightly cheaper with its target system. And, as a full blown, super--sophisticated blade server, a system that looks potentially more compelling.
Also, the HP system is the c3000. The Dell is a 3000i. Another happy coincidence? Or are these two companies trying to eat each other?
At these times, the most difficult thing for journalists to do often, is to get a realistic price out of somebody. Ask for a price and the answer will be, "it depends". To some extent this is fair enough because it does depend on the type of hardware, the amount, the sophistication (top of the line speedy disks or old, slow, should be pensioned off disks) and so on.
But with the SME market this just does not wash. Before they even start a conversation with you, most SMEs will want to know the price.
For years the IT industry has talked about getting into the SME market, mainly because they had saturated the market for large systems and SMEs provided the only prospects for growth.
Now they are at least doing the right thing by getting a bit more information out and in front of SMEs.
Will it work? We will see, but the fight will at least be entertaining. When Dell announced the system on Monday the company came up with an exact price. Very exact. £5,497 for an average system. The problem was that they could not come up with an exact configuration. All they would say was that the price was for a system with a couple of drives, and so on.
Coming after Dell, on Wednesday, HP was prepared. I put my hand up at the announcement press conference to ask a question and, before a word escaped my lips, HP's Steve Watson said: "And before you ask, the price is just under £5,000 for a system with a TB of disk."
He also provided the spec of the "typical" system shown in the diagram. In fact, HP appears ready to answer any questions at all that you may have on this system.
After being one-nil to Dell it was now one-all with advantage to HP. This is the sort of competition that the bosses of small businesses around the country can surely only benefit from.
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