theSpiel on Business

InfoWorld blogger Tom Yager gets a bit excited about AMD's Spider chipset. Quad-core meets graphics management in one super-moddable yet lower-power chip. In a word, it's another Intel-beater. (That's if you allow 2 hyphenated words to count as one, as I clearly do.) It's a good read, especially if you too get excited about performance improvements and renewed competition in the CPU marketplace.

I say that because I remember all too well the 'good old days' of competing CPUs from the likes of Motorola and Zilog, as well as Intel. Let alone competing operating systems! Yes, yes, we have AMD and a few others out there now but largely (and for too long) it's been a landscape of endless Intel and Microsoft design and manufacture, hasn't it? Now we have more hope for competition than ever, with the likes of Linux et al, generic Web Services and of course the Open Source movement opening up the software side of the world; and AMD offering some very realistic options in the hardware marketplace.

Labels: AMD, Intel, Motorola, Tom Yager, Zilog

A general ramble about business stuff...

• IBM lost server market-share but posted more revenue in Q3 2007. Now IBM won't be happy about losing share but they are clearly doing better at growing margins and selling into premium markets. So who should really worry about this - HP, Sun and Dell, or IBM? Hey, I work for IBM and this is my opinion only and not necessarily IBM's, but gee I'd rather be the guy making money than the guy discounting to the bone... if that's indeed what's happening.
• Motorola slips to 3rd in mobile handset market. Now traditional MBA-style strategic analysis will tell you that 1st or 2nd are the places to be, and climbing looks better than dropping. So that's bad news for Motorola (13% share, down from 21%), good news for 2nd placed Samsung (now 15%) and 1st placed Nokia (a whopping 38%). Yes, I'd be looking to improve the product and sharpen the marketing if I were in charge at Motorola - or get out of the kitchen.
• Sony win's Greenpeace's annual 'green-ness' award in electronics, replacing Nokia. Nintendo bottom of list. It's hard to know how this is measured fairly when unknowns abound. I suspect a lot of guesswork takes place, although policies are usually visible and practices can be tested, if Greenpeace actually go so far as to test them. Let's assume they do and give Sony a cheer, at least for now.
  

Labels: Dell, HP, IBM, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Sun