PCs and Profitability

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Sam Palmisano, departing CEO of IBM.

Sam Palmisano, departing CEO of IBM.

One of the fascinating technology company stories of the last decade is that of IBM. Or more specifically, the leadership of CEO Sam Palmisano and his ability to turn the juggernaut of a PC manufacturing company into a lean, mean software services machine. The following is a choice quote from the NYTimes article on Palmisano’s term as CEO that describes the transition IBM underwent:

The pursuit of excellence in those four dimensions shaped the strategy. To focus on doing unique work, with its higher profits, meant getting out of low-margin businesses that were fading. I.B.M.’s long-range technology assessment in 2002 concluded that the personal computer business would no longer present much opportunity for innovation, at least not in the corporate market.

The hub of innovation would shift to services and software, often delivered over the Internet from data centers, connecting to all kinds of devices, including PCs. Today, that is called cloud computing; when I.B.M. started promoting the concept several years ago the company called it on-demand computing.

Source: NYTimes

IBM managed to turn itself around and change the bread and butter of the company in relatively short order, considering the size of the supertanker the company had since become over the years. But at the time, it certainly wasn’t clear to a lot of outsiders that selling off the PC business to China-based Lenovo was the right choice. Leaving the top spot of PC manufacturing didn’t seem to make much sense, as why would you forfeit market leadership? To pursue greener pastures, of course.

But there’s another company out there that had been toying with the idea of selling off its PC manufacturing business. And they, too, happened to be considering this move at a time when they dominated the PC business as well: Hewlett Packard. Before he was ousted, former HP CEO Léo Apotheker made some major changes to the company, including a controversial decision to spin off or sell the company’s Personal Systems Group (PSG) – the consumer PC manufacturing division.

Apotheker was replaced by former Ebay CEO Meg Whitman in September, but the finality of the PSG decision was not resolved until over a month later at the end of October. Whitman announced that “together we are stronger” and cited several reasons why the move would have been bad for HP’s other business units. Notably, however, no mention was made of the strength (or lack thereof) of the PSG division on its own merits.

So while HP is keeping its PC manufacturing business around for now, the logic and success story of IBM’s emancipation from the hyper-competitive PC manufacturing business must still be a siren song for HP. The company may be numero uno in the PC manufacturing business in the present day, but with a mobile-centric computing future fast approaching, the dominance of the traditional PC manufacturer may not be secure for the long haul. HP’s decision to make WebOS open source (essentially giving up on the platform as a money-maker) and cessation of tablet and smartphone products that were imported during the Palm acquisition last year do not bode well for the flexibility of the company moving forward.

In the strictest sense, HP’s decision to hang on to the PSG division is a prudent move. But lasting impact and wisdom of the decision is contingent upon the time frame. And while the PSG division is the biggest asset in the PC manufacturing arena, it could quickly become the biggest liability should tablets and smartphones supersede the traditional personal computer. HP may have the strongest hand this round, but when the game changes, they won’t want to be left holding all the wrong cards.

 

Welcome to the Mega-Blog

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So perhaps it will seem naive – or maybe even foolish – for me to announce that I will once again return to a normal blogging regimen after such a long hiatus between posts. But I can offer only my sincere hope that I can maintain this blog with some regularity, especially now that I have consolidated all my previous blogging endeavors (except 1337cast and A Byte Of Apple) into one mega-blog. While the mash-up isn’t exactly ideal from a topic segmentation and organization perspective, at least it prevents me from stalling on writing posts because I have too many to manage.

I’ll also be changing up the format to posts written in under and hour.  Might not seem like a difficult target for just a simple blog post, but sometimes my blog topics end up consuming far more time researching a particular topic I want to talk about than the short amount of time required to actually put electrons to silicon (is that the new version of “ink to paper”?). As a mega-blog, however you’ll see technical posts, highly abstract intellectual posts, and some general updates on the life and times of Curtis J. Bunner. Jarring though it may seem from a continuity of content view, it’s actually a fairly accurate depiction of the different focal points in my life.

So stow your blade of pessimistic realism, and put on your armor of Quixotic optimism and join my in my quest for the Eternal Blog . . .

A “Call” For Cell Phone Security

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Ars Technica recently ran an article on the need for securing one’s cell phone. Against identity theft or having the device stolen, right? Nope. In this case, the “bad guys” are law enforcement. More specifically, a string of recent court decisions (the most recent being People v. Diaz (PDF) in the California Supreme Court) have begun to shift the legal view of a cell phone as no different from any other item eligible for warrantless searches.

The question, then, is what to do in light of this shift in privacy considerations for cell phones (which carry more and more of our personal lives on them). Would you want your entire email, call log, and texting history to be revealed because you owed money for an overdue parking ticket? Legally, such a warrantless search would be permissible. And while the chances of such an eventuality are probably slim for any one individual, it’s a stark reminder that data security and privacy concerns with relatively new and emerging technologies are unexplored territories in the legal world.

What does this mean for how we use our digital devices? Well, as the Ars Technica article suggests, put a password on your phone and enable disk encryption on your phone if it supports that technology. Can’t the police make you give them the password to get into the phone? Nope:

That’s because the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination bars the government from compelling an individual to divulge any information or engage in any action considered to be “testimonial”—that is, predicated on potentially incriminating knowledge contained solely within the suspect’s mind.

Disk encryption is usually an option on some more popular smartphones such as the iPhone, Blackberry, and Windows Phone 7 (sorry, Android users) support at least some form of full-disk encryption. This usually prevents access to the data stored on the phone in the event that the data is forcibly retrieved from the device (bypassing the password). If you have the option, it’s worth enabling for additional security.

So what’s the upshot of all this? Well, for one thing, the recent court decisions will probably spur many users into password-protecting their phones or even enabling disk encryption that otherwise wouldn’t have, which will also prevent against identity theft should their phones be stolen. The downside is that the law seems to think of a cell phone as no different than a wallet or pocket knife, when in fact our cell phones are becoming more deeply intertwined with our personal lives and identities every day.

The Hackintosh Is Dead, Long Live The Hackintosh!

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The last time I wrote on BunsenBlog, it was about how I had revived my interest in Hackintoshing. Well, since that time, I had completely eliminated all Hackintoshed systems . . . then about a couple weeks later recreated one. Why couldn’t I just make up my mind? It’s because of the fickle nature of the art of hacking, and my variable level of patience with such hacks.

This most recent flip-flop had its genesis in an ambitious plan to replace Mandy’s 5-year old iMac (still a decent system, don’t get me wrong) with a much more powerful Hackintosh. The intent was to build a system with a powerful enough graphics card that would enable Mandy to play Left 4 Dead 2 on Steam for Mac and free her from having to use the HTPC (Home Theater PC) in the living room for gaming.

The secondary part of the plan was to replace the current HTPC with a Hackintosh system that could access shared EyeTV recordings (stored on the iMac, which would ideally have been replaced by a Hackintosh) and stream content from our media server via Plex, a full-featured home theater interface for OS X. After investing money in parts to build / upgrade the Hackintosh systems, and about 20 hours of ultimately fruitless effort, neither Hackintosh ended up being stable enough or feature-complete enough to pass muster as a full-time replacement for the existing setup.

It was frustrating, to say the least. I was able to construct a work-around that involved leaving the iMac in its current role as Mandy’s desktop and turning the intended-to-be-Hackintosh into a plain ol’ desktop PC running Windows 7. It allowed for the use of OS X and gaming at Mandy’s desk, but was nowhere near as consolidated or elegant a solution as the Hackintosh plan I had originally hoped for.

A similar work-around was necessary for the HTPC as well. The central features of an ideal HTPC for me, given our current setup with EyeTV for OS X as the primary DVR system, would be a computer that could playback recorded EyeTV recordings, view content via common video delivery systems (Hulu and Netflix being the big two), and stream content from our media server. A Hackintosh running the EyeTV software and Plex for OS X would meet those criteria perfectly. Hence the desire to hackintosh (verb) our HTPC. When this didn’t work (boot issues, system sleep hang-ups, and bluetooth reliability issues), I basically reversed everything back to what it was before: a plain ol’ PC running Windows 7 and relying on Windows Media Center’s TV tuning abilities to watch live TV. But that wasn’t all . . .

Since it was running Windows 7, it wasn’t able to run the EyeTV software and view any recordings on the iMac either. For Live TV, Windows Media Center was the obvious choice, and easiest to configure. It does have DVR capability, but it was completely incompatible with EyeTV recordings. For Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services, Boxee has some decent features and social networking integration (that we probably would never use). And finally, for media streaming, XBMC (XBox Media Center) has a wealth of options. Having to use all three home theater software programs is a little silly, in my opinion. Especially because there is a LOT of duplication between all three, and always a tantalizingly close feature set for Boxee and XBMC.

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So that’s how the old Hackintosh plan fizzled out. What prompted me to revive the Hackintosh and compulsively try to give myself a headache again? The answer is simply, Garageband. There is no other podcasting software available that has the feature set and intuitive usability that Apple has provided. Or at least I haven’t a sufficient replacement yet. In the interim, Garageband is the best option. And because Garageband is designed to work as part of the iLife suite and make the Mac a great multimedia content creation platform (you can probably see where this is going), it’s an OS X only program. So, if I wanted to use Garageband, I had to have a Mac to use it on. That’s when I begrudgingly started to hop back into the saddle and begin working on re-creating the very Hackintosh that had stymied my prior efforts.

The good thing was that the level of tolerance for problems/issues/trouble for a podcast editing station with Garageband as the primary function is a lot higher than what it was for a dedicated HTPC or iMac replacement. Why? Well, I’m already accustomed to troubleshooting Hackintoshes over the years, and if it was only going to be used by me, I didn’t have a major reservation against dealing with the occasional kernel panic or re-patching with kexts. And since I had most of the parts left-over from the failed Hackintosh plan for the iMac and HTPC replacements, it was a good way to make use of available spare parts.

Third time’s a charm, I guess. It took several hours before I got the system to install OS X correctly (a malfunctioning DVD drive was to blame, it turns out), but after that it was smooth sailing. Or at least as much as one can expect while setting up a Hackintosh. About the only issues I had (and still have) is the lack of integrated audio (but this is largely mitigated by the USB-based headset w/mic that I use for podcast recording and editing in Garageband) and a frustratingly slow LAN transfer speed. The ethernet issue is still unresolved and annoying when doing any major file transfers over the network (it’s a gigabit LAN connection that works fine in Windows 7, but performs only at 10/100 speeds in OS X) but is adequate for most daily network tasks (EyeTV recording and podcast uploads).

The current Hackintosh setup I have is adequate to the task at hand, namely, editing podcasts in Garageband. But something curious happened as a result of the time spent setting up the new working Hackintosh. Some may remember my hilariously short-lived “Adequate Computing” phase, but I’m beginning to revisit that idea, albeit from a different perspective. I don’t think I will ever be content with the anemic Celeron-based system I had somehow tricked myself into accepting as good-enough. My 3.7GHz Core i5 system has spoiled me in terms of raw computing power. But the lowly Core i3-530 at 2.9GHz with two physical and two logical cores (4 threads total) is not nearly as shabby as one might think. In fact, with the main exception of gaming for CPU-bound games, I doubt I would even be able to tell the difference.

So why the change of heart . . . again? The answer comes in the form of the hard drive used. Odd, right? My preference for an other-wise modest system over my gaming behemoth has to do with the hard drive? Yep. And that’s because it uses an S.S.D. (Solid State Drive). But that’s a WHOLE different topic that I’ll save for another post . . .