Amazon has finally restored the “great majority” of its EC2 customers after a failure on its Elastic Block Storage (EBS) cloud DBMS left websites in limbo. The outage has already generated more than its share of commentary, and as usual there are more extreme views than useful ones. Some say that the problem demonstrates that…
Two “tech embarrassments” lead the news today, and there’s at least one lesson to be learned from each of them. Amazon had a cloud outage that disrupted some websites, and both Apple and Google are accused of tracking users with their smartphone technology. The Amazon outage was apparently related to its distributed RDBMS, though precise…
There were a lot of happy smiles on the Street yesterday as stocks skyrocketed, and things aren’t looking too shabby today either. Apple and GE posted better-than-expected numbers and at least for the moment the hope of an earnings-season blowout is overcoming concerns about Eurozone debt, US deficits, and even some uneasy unemployment numbers. Apple…
Tech earnings are demonstrating again that the global economy is recovering, and also demonstrating some of the dynamics within the tech market. Yesterday, IBM, Intel, and Juniper reported, and there’s something to learn from them all. IBM revenues overall were up 8% and earnings up 10%, and the IT giant raised its forecast for the…
Yesterday wasn’t pretty in the stock markets of the world, though many exchanges did manage to close off their lows. Here in the US the problem was that S&P issued an opinion on US debt that threatened to cut its triple-A rating if something weren’t done by 2013 to rein in deficits. How much of…
Nobody doubts that we’re seeing a revolution in video, but there are revolutions and revolutions, and it’s not yet clear just how sweeping the video change will be. Some recent data from Nielson seems to show that while online video viewing is increasing, it’s increasing primarily within a largely static group. Not only that, the four-hours-plus…
Google reported after the bell yesterday, and while the company reported a quarterly profit gain of 17% the numbers were below estimates because of higher costs. The Google results point out two issues that will not only haunt Google but also haunt the whole OTT or “Internet” sector; the limitations of advertising as a revenue…
Economic news is largely lacking today but the markets appear to be headed for another downturn, driven perhaps again by speculative short selling ahead of earnings season. Monetary and economic data worldwide isn’t suggesting any problem at this point, but it does seem to me that the stock market is trending a bit ahead of…
The cloud is in the news, in no small part because it’s earnings season and companies need to balance the need for publicity and the need to comply with SEC rules on “quiet periods”. Cloudiness is always a good way to get some positive ink. At any rate, we’re seeing three specific trends embodied in…
Cisco announced today that it would be “restructuring” its consumer business, dropping the Flip video line and focusing its home networking activities to gain better profits. The steps neither fix Cisco’s problems nor demonstrate with certainty that Cisco doesn’t know how to fix them, but they do seem to show that (dropping Flip notwithstanding) Cisco…