Author: Tom Nolle

Alcatel-Lucent reported their first quarter yesterday, and there was a lot of red ink in play.  The company’s equipment revenues fell below a critical threshold for the first time in years.  Particularly troubling was the fact that wireless lost almost 30% y/y and almost 12% q/q.  The only semi-bright spot was IP routing, that lost…

The latest casualty of the earnings season is Netflix, whose numbers actually beat the Street’s estimates but who offered subscriber data and guidance that scared the stream-touched among the investment community.  There should have been no surprise here and the fact that the stock got punished for the expected means that people still refuse to…

Microsoft reported its earnings, and other than some weakness in entertainment, the numbers beat the estimates.  The PC-software giant showed strength in business sales overall (where market growth was more than double the consumer space) and of course its Windows franchise still works (though not as well as before) even in the consumer laptop space. …

We had a number of interesting earnings reports today, so let’s get to it! Nokia’s numbers for the last quarter were awful, with smartphone sales falling sharply.  You can’t blame that completely on the Windows Phone decision, but it darn sure didn’t help and it’s not going to help them in 2012 either.  The question…

Cisco, one of the vendors we’ve been watching on the path toward what we think is the critical symbiosis of the cloud and OpenFlow/SDN, has blogged (http://blogs.cisco.com/news/is-it-just-sdn/) about their view of the subject.  I’m happy they did, but I confess to being a little confused by what they said.  It seems that Cisco is arguing…

Google is making news, again, for its left-of-center management practices.  The company turned in an exceptionally good quarter that beat estimates handily, and at the same time it announced it would be doing a 2:1 stock split but one that created only non-voting shares.  The goal, obviously and as the company admitted, was to prevent…

Euphonic, huh?  Well, earnings season is about to take off, which means we’ll likely have more financial results to review than tech bombshells.  Some companies are working to get their stuff out before they go quiet in their pre-earnings period, though, and one of them is HP.  After seeming to ignore the cloud, they now…

The fate of the cloud is also the fate of the network vendors, as I’ve noted before.  There is nothing that will stop the use of OpenFlow and SDNs for data center networking, and while arguments that “merchant silicon” can produce the optimum OpenFlow switch are false, it’s true that commodity switches could produce results…

Let’s face reality here.  For a decade now, we’ve had a vision of the future as one of a romp through a vast collection of entertainment, funded by advertising that we all try to never notice.  The fact is that all the ad metrics in the world don’t prove that anyone actually sees an ad,…