Historically, the wheels have come off the bus in spectacular fashion shortly after companies make big, bold revenue forecasts in the high tens of billions of dollars. If my memory serves, Compaq, Dell and IBM all hit the wall after stating ambitions of $50 billion, $60 billion and $100 billion respectively. If you have time to talk about…
The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is sort of a follow-up to his earlier Fooled By the Randomness, which dealt with why people are poorly suited to decision-making in the face of uncertainty. The Black Swan deals with the “impact of the highly improbable” and argues that these events, dubbed Black Swans, are far…
IBM is out touting their profit growth prospects (perhaps in response to having been eclipsed by HP in both performance and absolute size?). They are outlining their potential earnings growth by 2010 on moderate expected revenue growth. Today’s WSJ reports: “Of the roughly $5 increase in earnings per share that IBM says is possible by 2010, 75 cents…
Two posts in one week and both about the same issue of Wired no less. Yesterday’s kerfuffle in which Wired is “shocked, shocked” to learn there is a PR industry has been all over the blogosphere. Microsoft screwed up by accidentally sending Fred Vogelstein of Wired the internal briefing document written for the folks he was interviewing. …
The April issue has an article entitled “Desktop R.I.P.” that enthuses breathlessly about “computing moving off your machine and into the cloud”. I talked to the reporter, Jason Tanz, for this article a couple months ago (real-time Wired isn’t). Tanz, whose byline suggests his most eminent qualification to do the story was writing a book about Hip-Hop in…