88Pro Thinking

IBM ditching Itanium altogether

posted by 88Pro / Saturday, February 26, 2005

Cheeks, are in my opinion the most important facial feature we have. These round, chubby, fluffy, components, instill the greatest temptation – “cheek pinching”. Have you ever stopped for a moment and asked your self why humans have this instinct to touch, pinch, squeeze and even in the utmost cases slap these cheeks. All God’s creation have a purpose. Cheeks are no different. They have been created to be touched, pinched, squeezed and yes, once again slapped.

With that brief preamble to cheeks, let me introduce you to such a person, a person living between three worlds. For the purposes of this note let us identify this person as “Ms. Cheeks”.



Ms. Cheeks has shunned away from her god given obligation to honor the purposes that her cheeks have bestowed. The first person who identified this precious asset and made use of it first was her mother. Of course this was done to redden her cheeks before she goes on stage for a performance.

Ms. Cheeks now lives away from her parents and unfortunately the people around her now, have not realized the potential of these anatomic pleasures. My rationale for this blog is to inspire all those who read this to hunt out Ms Cheeks and pinch, touch or squeeze!. Do not slap.

If you are her friend, associate, colleague, parent, relative please help her accomplish the purpose that she has been bestowed. PINCH HER CHEEKS.

posted by 88Pro / Saturday, February 26, 2005

Some geek stuff you might want to read. Worked in a groupware project myself when I read the Groupware write up, I can't stop thinking how our Business Development and top management never realized this simple fact.

Rest of the write ups: http://www.jwz.org/doc/

An interesting web design: http://www.jwz.org/

posted by 88Pro / Thursday, February 24, 2005

For some reason I have always been interested in HRM. Especially on the subject of hiring, team building and employee productivity. Here are some weblogs which might interest you, if you like what I like.


Hiring Technical People

Michael Jordan(Sun Employee) on Management


Counter Offers

I found something very interesting about counter offers on MSDN blog.

I don't know anyone who recommends accepting one. In fact, you 'll find statistics that show that people that do accept a counter offer rarely remain at their workplace for any significant period of time afterward. They either quit because the things that made them want to leave the first time still make them want to leave, or they are let go because their employer just kept them around long enough for a replacement. Either way, the employee doesn't benefit. [read more]


The Counterproductive Counter-Offer

posted by 88Pro / Thursday, February 17, 2005

I was at the graduation ceremony of some of my x-students. It was all nice until the chef guest started his speech. He went on and on about nobody knew what but on one hand it was a lot of crap which no one understood and on the other it was totally irrelevant, except the final word “Congratulations”.

Here is something interesting I found on Paul Graham’s site, an essay he has posted which essentially a speech, supposed to be given at a high school. Something along this line would have been more appropriate.

What You’ll Wish You’d Known

posted by 88Pro / Thursday, February 17, 2005

Little History

Alpha was no doubt was one of the best 64 bit architecture world of computing ever saw. Why did it commercially fail? Since it ran only 64 bit applications, the useful application space was limited on Alpha platform. Although you could run 32 bit applications using FX!32 when used, it yields performance close to a slower Pentium processor. Therefore paying a higher price for an Alpha didn’t make much business sense. Of course it is a great architecture and was one of the solutions industry had for power hungry graphics application, but the market was niche. If you are targeting niche market, generally the price would have to be high in order to make reasonable profits, which in turn acts as a barrier for a product to reach main stream business and everyday user. There were attempts to bring Alpha to desktop by introducing Digital Alpha 21164PC.

Compaq bought Alpha, and HP acquired Compaq. Now HP had the brains it needed to come up with the next generation 64 bit processor. HP & Intel got down to business with Itanium, the next generation 64 bit processor.


HP, Intel & Itanium

They had technical capacity and funds to innovate a new 64 bit processor but it looks like they lacked the business common sense. They neither did learn from the history nor from the failure of Alpha processor. If a processor need to succeed it needs to have applications running on them, because everyone buys a processor to run some application on it. However designing a true 64 bit processor which does not run exiting 32 bit application will take another couple of decades to become rich in application space, that too if it is adopted main stream business and becomes a commodity. Perhaps one justification HP and Intel would have had to go ahead with that particular design would have been since it’s positioned as Server processors, it doesn’t need every other 32 bit application to be ported but just the server software like DB and application servers to be ported to 64 bit is enough. Although later when HP quit from Itanium, Intel still stuck to its commitment.


AMD’s Smart Move

While HP and Intel neglected the application space for their 64 bit processor AMD seems to be having done its home work. Building on Alpha’s failure, it realized if at all the processor is going to be successful the application space can not be neglected. The Opteron processor runs both 32bit and 64 bit applications enabling it leverage on the 32bit applications built over past few decades. The memory controller has been built into the processor which enables it to scale well in multi processor environments. This was one of the main factors for Sun to consider Opteron in its x86 strategy. This move of building a processor where 32 and 64 bit applications can co-exist gave AMD the key to become a main stream 64 bit processor and gave the company an opportunity to commoditize. Consequently when you come out of serving a niche market (people who would only want to run 64 bit applications) you can compete on cost. It also meant getting endorsed by major players in the industry like Microsoft, Sun and even HP.


Conclusion

Even if Alpha’s history didn’t teach Intel and HP a lesson, AMD success has. First step in coming out of a rot is accepting you have failed. May be Compaq merger was the single biggest reason sited for HP’s failure, however one cannot deny the fact that Itanium’s failure would have had its own share too. There is lot of challenges ahead for the new CEO of HP. Lets wait and see how he/she is going to turn the tables around. However if HP’s future strategy is going to be acquisition they might as well redesign their logo and change “Invent” to “Acquisition”.

posted by 88Pro / Sunday, February 13, 2005