In this blog I look beyond the obvious and try to find out why people and companies do what they do - and what it means for the rest of us. 
I spent yesterday at the NE VMUG at Gillette Stadium.  In short, while it had flaws, it was awesome.  I’ve been to well over 8 million of these types of shows.  This is my unabashed favorite of all time. Why?  Because it really is social networking 1.0. People are there because they want to be. [...]
Last week Boston area startup AutoVirt failed. Â They failed not because their stuff didn’t work (it worked quite well). Â They failed not because there was not a legitimate need (people need to do data migrations between systems/storage). They failed because they built a value proposition aimed at a person in an organization that the organization [...]
I love this data, which comes from ESG’s 2012 IT spending intentions survey (we’ve been doing this for years, so we have some excellent tracking data). This survey covers North America, Western Europe, and the Asia Pacific region. In 2009, people were 3X more likely to cancel an IT project, or cut headcount to contain [...]
I just wrote this article for Info Week about Big Data, where outside of stealing the concepts from Julie Lockner, we redefine this absurdly ill defined term. Simply put, big data applies to any data set that breaks the boundaries and conventional capabilities of IT.  That’s it.  What kinds of things break the boundaries of IT? [...]
‘Tis the season to distort reality to one’s benefit – fa la la la la,la la la la. Both WD and Seagate have decreased their drive warranties as of late – which is entirely due to the fact that they can’t make enough drives (or components) to support revenue demand – so why bother making [...]
For about a thousand years telecommunications companies have relied on analog wires connected through the land to dominate and capitalize on humans’ desire to speak to each other. The fact that few rarely have anything worth hearing is not the point. Since 1940, Telcos have enjoyed massive success. The cloud is about to either radically [...]
Only I would fly to China for 36 hours, but alas, it is my life. It remains a fascinating land, full of smog, and gross people. God I do love it. There are now 87 different wines in China, which is good. Most of them are awful, which is bad. Terrifying: looking up while driving [...]
In general, markets hype themselves well above their ability to extract actual money. Cloud is no exception, but as it matures, realities begin to take shape. Petfood.com or Furniture.com didn’t fail because the Internet didn’t work. They failed because they had stupid business models. There are plenty of stupid business models wrapped around cloud. There [...]
This post is less about true startup death and more about companies who have passed their first major hurdle–they have successfully navigated their youth and delivered a real product to a real market. Sometimes, they have been wildly successful with their first product. Then comes the second product, and that shits the bed. If the [...]
When I was a relatively young man, Coke, the perennial powerhouse, introduced New Coke. It was an unmitigated disaster that might have a killed a lesser brand. It ended faster than Kim Kardashian’s latest marriage. Coke is a big company, with tons of money, and tremendous marketing resources. One might think that prior to risking [...]
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