Yesterday’s announcement of Apple’s fourth quarter result for 2011 was
astounding to say the least. Growth from a year-ago quarter was 118%. Sales
for the quarter at $46.3 Billion yielded profit of $13.1B. Wow – that
profit is more than 3 times what General Electric earned in its most recent
quarter. These figures blew analysts’ projections. Apple’s cash hoard is
$97.6B, more than the market capitalizations of all but 52 publicly traded
companies.
Today Apple’s shares are up around $450, making its market capitalization
surpass Exxon Mobile. So Apple is the most valued corporation in the US and
the world. This is significant as the founder and visionary leader of Apple
Steve Jobs died last October. The momentum of sales continued even stronger
than before. The new iPhone 4S sold briskly contributing to the total sales
of 37M iPhones. Even the iPad sold 15.4 Million... (more)
As we usher into the new year, one thought keeps haunting me – how many
hours are we spending in front of a screen, be it our smart-phone, tablets,
laptop, desktop or TV? Gone are the simple joys of life – reading a book
quietly, talking a walk without any distractions, or just being quiet.
The average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of
a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in
part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between
2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV scre... (more)
On Wednesday, August 24, 2011, Steve Jobs resigned from Apple as its CEO. He
will stay as chairman of the board, handing over the CEO mantle to Tim Cook.
Even though this was sort of expected ever since Steve went on his medical
leave early this year, the news of his resignation came as a shock – that
it finally happened.
Much has been written since last 24 hours on his legacy and brilliance in the
tech industry, his obsession with elegant design and simplification for
users. He was way ahead of everyone else in this industry by not a year or
two, maybe ten years. I love this po... (more)
The world of Data Management has never been this vibrant as now. Only five
years back, if you were to start a new database product company, the VC’s
would have thought you to be real crazy. Why start something in an
established market with 3 leaders – Oracle, IBM (DB2), and Microsoft (SQL
Server)? Then we started to notice “specialized” appliance products such
as Netezza (now IBM) and Greenplum (now EMC) crop up, to focus on large
scale data analytics. This trend was soon followed by Oracle (Exadata) and
now HP (Vertica).
But what I am talking about is a list of new companies b... (more)
Sam Palmisano took over IBM’s CEO role back in 2002 from Gerstner who was
brought in to restore IBM from its historic decline during the early 1990s. I
was an employee of IBM for 16 years until the year 1992. I left early in 1992
and by the end of the year people were asking me how did I know that such
decline was coming. My answer was that I had no idea and I really agonized
over the wisdom of leaving IBM, a great company by any measure.
Palmisano went into the second phase of “value creation” and changing
IBM’s course in several ways. He said that the world is instrumented,
in... (more)