Author: Tom Nolle

Business changes in networking are often more significant than technical changes even though networking is ostensibly a tech market area, and that’s the case this AM in my view.  NSN has announced a major refocusing/restructuring that will cut about 17,000 jobs worldwide and concentrate company efforts on mobile broadband.  Obviously this is a big deal…

HP reported its quarter, and while the company’s revenue-line beat of estimates buoyed its stock after hours, we think that the results were at least as troubling as they were gratifying for HP, or at least they should have been. Whitman’s decision not to spin out the PC business was a major risk factor for…

The Street is busy handicapping the networking space, and what they’re finding is interesting in part because it demonstrates that stock potential and company sales and influence aren’t always congruent.  Sometimes they are, though. One recent Street favorite is Cisco, whose sudden fall from financial grace shook both investors and company management.  The result was…

Amazon’s quarter disappointed almost everyone, and the fact that there were so many different views about just what was disappointing makes it all the more challenging to analyze.  Many said the profit picture was the problem; Amazon’s margins have been thin historically and the Street wanted proof that they’d fatten up.  They didn’t get it. …

UBS reports that there are some unusual shifts in telecom spending, and I agree if one defines “unusual” as being “atypical to past performance” rather than “without clear cause”.  What they’re seeing is a lower-than-usual ramp in capex in the fourth quarter, and a larger shift toward wireless investment.  Duh!  We have a lower ramp…

Our second day of “Big Earnings” week has brought some more interesting developments, from which I hope to draw some interesting conclusions.  We have ups and downs, as usual, and that’s pretty much what I had expected to see this quarter.  The “secular” or broad market trends are really not driving the bus here; it’s…

Cisco announced that it would support OpenFlow, the protocol that’s sometimes seen as the pathway to an open-source router market that could kill Cisco off.  The move only demonstrates how useless it is to read stuff these days!  In a neutrality-driven world with no settlement for QoS among ISPs and no regulatory basis for creating…

Google’s numbers for the quarter were very good, beating estimates and highlighting its mobile ad performance, but the company was short on details of how the earnings were derived.  My personal view is that Google is doing well with search and still working things out elsewhere.  Sure mobile is doing well, but it’s likely that…

Comcast’s ambitions attempt to create a network-view model at the earliest possible point in movie distribution, the same time a film is in theaters, has apparently been pulled back under a protest from studios.  The thought was to set the price high enough that people would have easily been able to get a better deal…

A ComScore report shows that traditional PCs still account for over 93% of online traffic, with mobile phones at about 5% and tablets the rest.  Among the appliances, Apple’s iOS devices represent most of the web traffic.  I think this is an interesting data point when you consider the evolution of the Internet and Internet…