Systems software technology and business
Coverity has a program that reads other programs looking for errors. The company started as a research project from Stanford (how unusual!) and the Communications article is really about what they found in commercial world. One thing they found was a lot of crappy programmers.
Upon seeing an error report saying the following loop body was [...]
We’re starting to see a confluence between IT and energy that will change both industries. A windmill power data center is an interesting data point. At some time, we’re going to want to control the energy generation from the data center – for example, to run big batch jobs when the wind is blowing or [...]
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA–(Marketwire – 11/10/09) – Cavium Networks (NASDAQ:CAVM – News), a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, wireless, storage and video applications, today announced that it is has signed a definitive agreement to acquire MontaVista Software for $50 million, comprised of approximately $16 million in cash [...]
The company I work for now really does not care about IP. I design low-cost consumer products that get shipped offshore to be produced. The big deal is time-to-market and being first. After something is successful and commoditized, it will be copied and driven to the lowest possible cost. Thus, there is no longer a [...]
If anything, Wind River’s inability to breakout, despite a once Microsoft-like position of dominance, is a by-product of their failure to meaningfully go “up the stack” and away from their historical focus on the silicon layer as a primary differentiation point.
In other words, if Wind River had enabled the next generation of Cisco and Apple [...]
Although the payoff of a small niche may be less than that of a large, growing market, the competion may often also be less intense. The majority-fallacy concept states that appraisals of fast growing segments overlook of minimize the likelihood that many competitors will be attracted. This explains why growth areas often stimulate destructive overcapacity [...]
From Wladawsky-Berger’s blog entry on Carlota Perez’s analysis in 2005:
She mentions three particular structural tensions that we need still to work out in order to move on: investments continue to be focused on short-term gain, not on long-term production and growth; the social system continues to foster an unstable environment in which the rich get [...]
I’m on my way to Linz, Austria to participate in a panel at an event called Cleantech Venture Forum. We’ve spent a lot of the last two years looking at ways to save power in data centers and mini-data centers (which may be a term nobody else uses). If we look at the history of [...]
Grossly simplifying, some products are Bill of Materials (BOM) products and some are Designed products. BOM products come to market via a process of generating a parts list and then integrating. In place of designers, BOM products have buyers and integrators. In place of innovation, BOM products have standards. The standards are preferably [...]
Article in the New Yorker on Google contains a fascinating description of a product design meeting:
Page and Brin had wanted an upgrade of an existing product, and they were unhappy with what they were hearing from the engineers. At first, they were stonily silent, slid down in their chairs, and occasionally leaned over to [...]