Jnan Dash

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)

Information – Knowledge – Wisdom

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)

Steve Jobs’s Resignation as Apple CEO

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)

Data Management, Circa 2011

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)

Leadership at IBM – Sam Palmisano

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)