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- CA dumps Unicenter
- Want to get rich in UK IT? Head for the hills
- On 4GLs and why ‘Web 2.0’ is a step back in time
- Why iPhone will cannibalise iPod sales
- Running down the iPhone alternatives
- At last, some iPhone cynicism sets in
- Does iPhone signal end of PC era? Ha!
- Defraggers attack Vista, each other
- What were the most trafficked articles in 2006?
Jason Stamper's Blog: January 2007 Archives
CA dumps Unicenter
January 31, 2007
Not long after I broke the news that HP has dropped its OpenView brand in favour of just making it part of HP Software, I hear that CA is ditching its various sub-brands including Unicenter, eTrust, BrightStor and so on, as well as various product brand names like PestPatrol, Endevor and FileSurf....
Want to get rich in UK IT? Head for the hills
January 30, 2007
Research just out has shown that IT staff in the UK regions are rapidly closing the pay gap on the highest earning IT professionals in London. Taking into account the higher cost of living in London, that trend could mean you may be better off out of the big smoke.
There is still a gap, albeit narrowing. Salaries for IT professionals in the regions are now 82% of London, up from 79% last year. Indeed the difference in pay between London and the regions has narrowed in IT more than in other sectors -- the pay gap between the regions and London in all occupations closed by just 1% in 2006.
On 4GLs and why ‘Web 2.0’ is a step back in time
January 23, 2007
You may or may not have seen a little piece I did for our news desk on Progress Software’s SVP for corporate development and strategy, who told me that he believes that fourth generation languages (4GLs) -- or something very like them -- may be due for a comeback.
"If you look at what salesforce.com has been doing recently with a high productivity development environment and database that you don't need to know much about, that's a lot like a 4GL,” Progress’ Jeff Stamen told me. “Likewise, plenty of companies are saying that they do not want to do all their programming in such low-level languages as Java."
Stamen knows his stuff. He began his career as a database developer, leading a joint MIT Harvard project where he developed an entity-relationship database for query and analysis. After that he joined Mitrol, where he headed the development of the MIMS 4GL, an antecedent of the Progress 4GL....
Why iPhone will cannibalise iPod sales
January 17, 2007
CEOs have often told me that sometimes it is necessary to make your earlier products obsolete by bringing out new, improved versions. ‘Eat your young’, they say, or ‘cannibalise your products.’ When Gillette brings out a 5-blade razor, it’s 3- and 4-blade razor sales suffer as a result.
I made the point in an earlier blog that Apple’s iPhone, which essentially combines a phone and an iPod, is likely to eat into its sales of iPods. That’s not necessarily a bad thing if it starts selling iPhones at the rate it has been selling iPods, and anyway the logic described above is that although you may make your own earlier product almost obsolete, it is better that you do so than one of your competitors does it for you. If Gillette hadn’t come out with a 5-blade razor, then someone else would.
Running down the iPhone alternatives
The Independent newspaper offers some readers' verdicts on possible Apple iPhone rivals here. As it notes, all of these are available now, while the iPhone won't be available for a while yet.
At last, some iPhone cynicism sets in
January 15, 2007
I’m glad I’m not the only one trying to keep a level head about the new iPhone. James Governor and his colleague Cote round up some of the more cynical coverage so far as a welcome antidote to the ludicrous over-exuberance – in my humble opinion – that is so rife.
We’ve seen one analyst declare that it’s not just another smart phone, it creates a whole new category, one of 'brilliant phones'. I know, I know.
Over at the engadget mobile blog they have a list of their key problems with it, namely...
Does iPhone signal end of PC era? Ha!
January 10, 2007
Blogger Om Malik headlines one of his recent posts, “iPhone and the End of PC Era” here. He doesn’t go so far as to say that Apple’s new iPhone will bring about the demise of the PC, but he does argue: “While I am not suggesting that this replaces our notebooks or desktops for crucial productivity tasks, the iPhone (if it lives up to its hype) is at least going to decrease our dependence on it.”
I heard this kind of over-exuberance when Apple launched the Mac Mini, its slimmed-down computer (sans monitor, keyboard or mouse) with loads of Apple software onboard. This from The Independent newspaper at the time of the Mac Mini launch: “A technology and price breakthrough to rank with the launch of the first iPod itself in 2001… and other milestones in the computer age - such as the release of the Sinclair Spectrum in 1982… or the launch of Microsoft's Windows 95 in August 1995."
Conveniently, no one knows how many Mac Minis have been sold as Apple won’t say. Piper Jaffray & Co. analyst Gene Munster estimated they sold 138,000 in their first quarter after they were launched in January 2005. Roger Kay of IDC predicted that the Mini would boost Apple's computer shipments by 50% in 2005.
Either way, while the numbers are excellent news for Apple they pale into insignificance compared to the PC market as a whole. Around 180 million PCs were sold in 2004, only 3.5 million of which were Macs. If Apple sold, say, a million Mac Minis last year, it will still have barely moved its overall market share of around 4% of the total desktop market.
I am not saying the Mac Mini has been unsuccessful from Apple’s point of view – it clearly has -- but a technology and price breakthrough to rank with the launch of Windows 95? Please.
Quite why it is Apple more than any other vendor that has the capacity to put ideas of disruptive innovation like this into journalists’ and bloggers heads is beyond me. The iPod was disruptive, it is true. But adding a phone to it?
To be fair, Malik stops short of saying the iPhone will usher in the end of the PC era. But he comes dangerously close.
Defraggers attack Vista, each other
Warning: this is not a blog about yesterday’s launch of the Apple iPhone. No, it’s about a furore going on in a very different market segment.
Diskeeper’s claim that its recently launched Diskeeper 2007 disk defragmentation utility makes it the first defragmenter that has no impact on the system it is running on has been greeted with derision by rival Raxco Software. But both vendors agree that the disk defragmentation tool bundled with Vista is at best inadequate.
Competition in the market is stiff, as with escalating storage demands being placed on hard disks, defragmentation is as vital as ever. Yet disk fragmentation is a problem often overlooked by enteprise IT departments, if not when it comes to servers then almost certainly when it comes to end users' workstations.
Fragmentation of hard disks in servers, workstations and storage devices is thought to be a major cause of performance degradation. In the white paper “The Impact of Disk Fragmentation”, the author -- security and systems expert Joe Kinsella -- claimed that heavy fragmentation can cause applications such as Microsoft Word to slow down by a factor of 15, anti-virus scanners and Outlook by a factor of three, and Internet Explorer by a factor of two.
Disk fragmentation is the fault of the file system, in Windows’ case NTFS. The file system tells the computer where to find specific data on the disk and where there is free space available for new files to be created.
But over time both file fragmentation and free space fragmentation can occur when the file system inadvertently scatters individual files or free space across several locations, instead of keeping them in contiguous chunks. The result can be performance problems, corrupted files or even application or system crashes.
Enter disk defragmentation tools, or ‘defraggers’, which go through the disk and put the pieces back together again. The trouble is, the defraggers themselves can be resource-hungry, so the defragmentation utility vendors have mostly added scheduling options so users or administrators can run them when their systems are not busy doing something else.
But according to Diskeeper, scheduling is no longer necessary as its latest version, Diskeeper 2007, has something called InvisiTasking, making it, “The first truly automatic defragmenter which defragments files on the go without any impact on the system.”
This is a notion that the CEO of rival Raxco Software, Bob Nolan, takes strong exception to: “This approach is based on the utilization of system idle time,” he told me. “In order to determine when the system is idle you need to monitor CPU, disk I/O and memory. The monitor itself uses resources; and of course it runs while the system is doing other work.”
What were the most trafficked articles in 2006?
January 03, 2007
Happy New Year – I hope you had a good break, if you had one. While in body I am now back at work my brain is still coming to terms with the notion, so you’ll excuse me a rather simple post as my first blog of 2007.
All I’ve done is use our web analytics software to see which news and feature articles from our site, www.cbronline.com, drew the most traffic during the course of 2006. I've excluded our blogs -- I may come back and drill down into the traffic for each of the blogs another day as they are different beasts to our features and news articles.
The results are actually quite a good reflection of the big trends that gripped the IT industry during the course of last year: SOA, open source, mashups, VoIP, web 2.0, IBM vs. SCO and so on. Anyway here they are –- notice that some of them were actually written in late 2005 but were still getting loads of traffic as 2006 drew to a close.
I’m pleased that on the whole the articles do exactly what I want Computer Business Review to do: the features cut through the hype and explain what’s really going on, while our news offers exclusive angles and digs behind the headlines. I'm biased, of course -- see what you think:
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