We, and in particular the media, would love technology to move in grand majestic sweeps. Instead, the market moves in little lurches and hiccups, and so sometimes you have to read through the obvious to find useful signs of a trend. Today we have three news items to ponder; Apple’s rumored CDN, Microsoft’s new CEO,…
The FCC has issued its order regarding the “experimentation” with the evolution of the public network—both from TDM to IP and from wireline to wireless. The details of the process are no surprise. The FCC wants to understand how a modernization trend would impact the four “core values” of public safety, universal service, competition, and…
I want to pose a question, as a prelude to looking at Amazon’s and Google’s quarters. The question is “Is the kind of intelligence portrayed in the movie ‘Her’ possible?” The reason for the question is that it’s clear that the notion of almost-human machine intelligence in the movie captured a lot of imaginations. It’s…
The term “-washing” is applied all too often in our industry, where the dash is preceded by the name of some hot technology like “cloud”, “SDN”, or “NFV”. Everyone loves publicity and if you can get it by simply tattooing the name of some hot concept on your forehead, so much the better. Of course,…
Some of my readers likely think I spend too much time on business issues in networking, preferring that I talk about revolutionary technology. Well, if the Founding Fathers had been stranded on a desert island through the late 1700s all their revolutionary precepts would have done is inspire birds, fish, and maybe turtles. Revolutions depend…
This is another one of those days when you have a bunch of news items that reflect a common theme. What do Yahoo, OpenCompute, and AT&T have in common? They’re all about the business of networking. Yahoo reported another quarter of disappointment, which frankly should never have been a surprise given that there was nothing…
Apple reported its numbers yesterday, and they showed what might have been a surprise for Apple fans, was surely a disappointment for the Street, and things that I’d been concerned about for quite a while. In short, Apple’s message is that “It isn’t easy to be cool, and coolness isn’t very durable either!” Apple’s three…
In October of 2012, an insightful group of network operators published the “Call for Action” that launched Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). I responded to that call with some suggestions, among which was a recommendation that a prototype be developed as soon as possible. Operators encouraged me to do that, and a project group came together…
I’ve criticized Cisco often for making statements more calculated to generate PR than to provide any insight about the conditions in the networking space. Cisco’s CTO Padmasree Warrior has been at least as guilty as any other Cisco exec in this regard, but I recently saw a quote from her that makes some sense. The…
We had a lot of news yesterday, news that I’m going to assert all adds up to cloud-driven change. To open this blog (since I’m a networking guy after all) I want to start with Juniper. The company had a decent quarter and while it’s guidance was cautious, the initial reaction of the market to…