Articles by Charles King

Ironically, the greater IT accomplishments become, the harder they are to see. Consider Intel's latest achievement: the new Broadwell architecture that shrank microprocessor manufacturing from the previous generation 22-nanometer Haswell process to 14nm. Since a nanometer is a millionth of a millimeter (a human hair is about 100,000nm thick) you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference without an electron microscope.

There's no shortage of utopian visions in the IT industry, but the journey to cloud computing that some folks espouse makes the trip to Shangri-La look like a simple walk in the park. Why so? Because, like it or not, even in the best circumstances businesses must continue to support legacy applications and systems while they are adopting next-gen technologies.

A confluence of recent events has gotten me thinking about laptops. First, IDC and Gartner released PC market surveys that suggest a significant slowing in the declines plaguing PC sales for the past few years. Then last week, due to "stronger than expected demand for business PCs," Intel said it was raising Q2 and full-year revenue and gross margin expectations.

SAP's recent Sapphire NOW user and partner conference in Orlando was a love fest for the company's HANA in-memory database technology. SAP has made it quite clear that HANA is far more than an innovative solution for Big Data, analytics and business intelligence workloads. In fact, HANA and complementary SAP solutions, including the new cloud-base...

EMC World -- the company's annual customer, user and partner conference -- kicks off this week in Las Vegas. So it seems like a good time to compare and contrast EMC's current position in the marketplace to its competitors' positions -- and even to its own history. In fact, those points were clarified in its recent Q1 2014 earnings call More broadl...

Longevity doesn't get much respect in the tech industry, partly due to new technologies regularly entering and dominating industries and commercial markets. However, cultural factors play a part, too. Much of IT's vibrancy results from the startup mindset and youthful employees who willingly embrace crushing 80-hour work weeks for a chance to beco...

Like most small, inbred communities, Silicon Valley encourages and thrives on gossip, even when it's of little substance. In popular-speak, Valley gossip has a "low signal to noise ratio," but the rumor mill is vibrantly alive despite that shortcoming -- partly due to venture capitalists, whose efforts parallel the day-to-day business of technology.

During the heyday of the dot-com boom, then-HP CEO Carly Fiorina espoused a notion called "good enough" computing. Despite significant performance differences between x86 servers and Unix and other enterprise-class systems, the dramatically lower cost of x86-based products would cause organizations to rethink their computing priorities and adopt, buy and deploy x86 whenever and wherever possible, she maintained.

The retail image of consumer electronics products -- bright and shiny in their meticulously sterile packages -- fundamentally contradicts how they are manufactured. Anyone who has spent time on a factory floor knows this. The work is often dirty and occasionally dangerous, emphasized speed leads to injuries, and the constant stress of repetitive motions and work quotas can exact other kinds of tolls.

In case you missed last week's announcement that Lenovo would be acquiring IBM's System x x86 server business, here are some of the details: Lenovo is acquiring IBM's x86 server hardware business for US$2.3 billion, approximately $2 billion of which will be paid in cash and the balance in Lenovo stock. The assets covered by the deal include the Sys...

The past couple of years have seen rising interest in and considerable promotion of servers and appliances based on the ARM microprocessor architecture At first glance, the narrative makes some sense. ARM's native performance and energy efficiency, when multiplied across hundreds or thousands of systems, looks impressive for supporting certain kind...

For IT industry analysts, autumn is a migratory time filled with trips to vendor conferences and summits. While their forms and locations tend to differ, most vendors use the time to delineate how their strategies, solutions and sales have progressed during the past calendar year and to discuss where they will be heading in the months and years ahead...

My regular job involves writing and talking almost exclusively about business IT, but every once in a while I like to consider how personal technology impacts my day-to-day life. Three acquisitions have come my way in the past couple of months: the Nexus 5; the Mohu Curve 30; and a 2013 Toyota RAV4 EV....

A bit more than six months ago, EMC and VMware celebrated the launch of Pivotal, a new company led by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz. Pivotal's team included IP and personnel from EMC's Greenplum and Pivotal Labs organizations, and VMware's vFabric (including Spring and Gemfire), Cloud Foundry and Cetas organizations. A considerable surprise was th...

IBM's recent Enterprise 2013 conference in Orlando, Fla., was the Systems and Technology Group's inaugural event focusing on high-end business solutions. So it was no surprise that the CIOs, partners and IT practitioners -- data center admins and managers -- who work with IBM's System z mainframe and Power Systems platforms were thick on the ground.

Customer testimonials play an odd role in many IT industry announcements. At first glance, they offer proof that technologies are actually being used successfully as advertised, lending credence to vendors' sometimes lofty go-to-market claims. Even the most enthusiastic clients tend to guarded, though, for fear that they may injure relationships with other vendors or negate whatever competitive advantages a new technology affords them.

It doesn't take a genius to perceive the difficulties mainline PC vendors have faced over the past three to four years. As user preferences have shifted toward ultramobile products such as smartphones and tablets, PC makers and core allies have suffered enough stumbles, false starts and pratfalls in their attempts to keep up to populate a Hangover movie.

Silicon Valley loves an underdog. That's partly because such tales feed the industry's self-mythologizing and the IPO culture that attracts fresh money and new investors. To be honest, IT can boast more than its fair share of such successes: Hewlett and Packard, Jobs and Wozniak, and Page and Brin all helped make the industry what it is today and, in turn, inspired a Gold Rush mentality of remarkable durability...

Technology has always enabled the "factorification" of processes and skills for both users and suppliers of IT. The success of early computing solutions rested in replacing hundreds and thousands of Bob Cratchett-like professionals with systems that required few, if any, sick days and no vacations. Then businesses discovered they needed to hire hu...

No matter how important or well intentioned, technology industry press releases are seldom entirely free of hyperbole. So in parsing any announcement, it's good to keep an eye on 1) what is being done; 2) who is involved; and 3) how and why the world will be different if they succeed In the case of the OpenPower Consortium recently announced by IBM...