Alexander Chalkidis

Tag: IBM

  • Moving the i-Goalposts

    In the old days we used to have great flame wars of PC vs Mac.  Back then Apple was going to conquer the desktop.  They never even got close of course.  Everyone talked about Apple machines but bought PCs.  There was always some secret plan, some new technology, a “gamechanger” just around the corner that Apple was about to reveal.  There was firewire (much better than USB!) or other Apple-proprietary flops which remained in the Apple ecosystem or just quietly died out.  Apple fan boys still talk about them.  Apparently the world was wrong to go mainstream with Windows and Intel, “if only they had all picked the better technology” and gone with Apple….

    Similar story with iPads.  For the second time in Apple’s history, education would be key.   Schools apparently would fill up with iPads.  The PC is no longer important, check out market share of all devices and iOS is conquering the planet!  Well, no, it didn’t.  iPads are already retreating big time in terms of market share.   Apple’s latest hope, the collaboration with IBM is probably first fanboy fiction which actually has a hope.   But only because of IBM infrastructure and serious technology.

    Apple couldn’t support going mainstream.   Much like Facebook struggled to keep up with demand as it growed.   Billions of hits on your servers from all around the world is quite something to handle.   On Apple-only technology it would be impossible.   Since switching to Intel of course, things are much better.   Apple can pretend to be running on Apple hardware, get real software companies to handle the software and actually gradually catch up with Microsoft and Google, SAP, Oracle and all the other serious companies.  They use Oracle and IBM for their data centers since 2010.  In order for Apple to support its own Content Delivery Network they will need to steal a damn lot of specialized engineers, copy or buy the pop count models of Level3/Edgecast/Limelight or buy them out, figure out how iPhone users are different and then lose money big time for several years until they figure out the optimum configuration.

    The plateau reached by iPhones is typical in this respect.  While others talk about iOS catching up and iWatches, I watch the total user base numbers.   Only Google can handle the number of Android devices around.  People nag about the Play store but who else could build an infrastructure able to handle the payload?   If Apple made a cheaper iPhone and sold more of them, they would need to outsource even more of their infrastructure.   Sooner or later the myth bubble would burst.   Apple needs to keep up the fantasy of a “different” and “superior” ecosystem.   Have you striving for the “ideal” of living with iPhone, iPad, MacBooks all around you.   And this despite the fact that Apple was never able to build a proper retail channel?

    In fact, the greatest news about the Apple-IBM deal is that IBM might force Apple to stop changing adaptors, connectors, file formats and everything else they change all the time!  Because which corporate buyer in their right mind will invest in a company that suddenly stops supporting a device you bought only 2 or 3 years ago?  Steve Jobs might get away with telling consumers to hold their iPhone differently in order to get better reception, but corporate contracts don’t have quite the same patience….   IBM might also provide some much need oomph in terms of Artificial Intelligence through the Watson platform because – let’s face it – Siri has no chance in hell of catching up with Google does it?

    The myth of a superior operating system has been maintained by Apple not through real innovation but through acquisitions.   They never spent enough on R&D to come up with real technological breakthroughs.   Steve Jobs was a genius not in “giving the people what they didn’t know they wanted” but in dressing up technologies that already existed.   You can only do that so much though.   So he bought in stuff.   Look at a the list of Apple acquisitions.   When Apple wanted to pretend they were kings of digital video they knew their software was rubbish.  It was written by the same guy who wrote PremierePro, the software they made fun of!  So they bought other companies and gave it away with Final Cut.   Software that used to sell for $10,000 on its own, was suddenly thrown in the suite for free.  As long as you buy in to the Apple fantasy…

    I have written before that Tim Cook really is Apple’s only hope.  IBMesque moves will save the company.  But handling their fanboys fanatic approach to everything is slowing them down.

  • I miss those old IBM laptops

    The keyboard was magic.    You didn’t realize quite how good it was until you fumbled around with anything else.  I can touch type in the dark almost unconsciously on one of those IBM keyboards.   Then again I didn’t have to because they had that cool little light built in the top which would light up your keyboard for just enough light to see in a dark airplane cabin or children’s bedroom.   IBM laptops were always under the specifications of other laptops in their price range.   They looked boring.   You didn’t ask for one so much as find it on your desk as the company IT guy seemed to love them for some boring IT reason…

    Yet somehow they performed better.   And they always lasted longer. You wished they would fall apart so you could get something with a new CPU that looked better but they plod on.   In fact they hardly ever die!   That hidden partition for system recovery they have makes sure you can always bounce back and get a brand new system in an hour or so.

    Maybe some other manufacturer has similar quality and attention to detail nowadays.   I haven’t bumped into it.   Macs are cool but not a work-horse like those IBM laptops, so much as a style or fun pony.  HP top end models are impressive in specs sometimes but the component quality varies enormously from model to model.   IBM laptops consistently included features which came out of serious research.   Sure, they often got their marketing wrong and some models were just plain silly.   But I very much doubt anyone, ever regretted the money they spent on any laptop IBM made.

    This is not to say that quality is dead or to lament ages bygone as tech dinosaurs often do.   But for people like me that will always have at least one dual disk, RAID, SSD, as-many-core-processors-as-possible, massive graphic card and all the bells and whistles type laptop, it seems like there is a bit of a gap in the market.   Laptops are commodities which is great since they cost less but not so great when they don’t help us produce more.

    So I watch my kids play on old IBM laptops and sing their praise retrospectively.  Machines ten and fifteen years old running amazingly well.   (I think we have to give some credit to Microsoft for the fact that Windows XP is still so widely supported.)   I love technology and enjoy trying out the latest and greatest.   I just miss those seriously scientific IBM engineers that gave us these gems and hope to find more of their spirit somewhere down the line.