Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) chips away Intel’s (NASDAG: INTC) chip market share

FOR many years, Moore's Law was regarded the sacred rule of information technology. It predicted that industry advances would require a doubling of chip capacity every 18 months. 

The law was named after Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, who first postulated the idea in 1965. Unfortunately for Intel, the company paid too much attention to the law and too little attention to what was really going on in the consumer electronics world. Personal computers, the old industry standard, were becoming eclipsed by mobile Internet devices like tablets and smartphones that required a new kind of chips.

Intel officials attending the annual Intel Developer Forum held in Beijing last week admitted with some embarrassment that Moore's Law no longer holds true. 

"It's a pity that we looked forward, but we acted at a slow pace," said Ian Yang, Intel China's president.

It was a remarkably frank admission from the world's biggest computer chip maker, a company that many think blew the opportunity to position itself early in the market for chips operating on mobile Internet devices. That market is now dominated by the likes of Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and ARM.

For past decades, Intel developed chips for computers and set market trends because of its huge market share and influential sway over the industry, The company captured around an 85 percent share of the computer chip market, especially after it developed products for netbooks - super mobility computers with basic Internet functions.

Moore's Law might have held true for Intel had not seen the tablet computer suddenly burst on the scene. When Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) launched its iPad globally last year, the industry framework changed dramatically - and not in a way favourable for Intel.

Compared with the traditional computer and the lightweight netbook, the iPad provides users a long battery life, touch screen and huge amount of online applications that add up to a popular user experience.

For the industry, it has boiled down to a battle between computing power and user experience, and Intel is finding itself on the wrong side of the trend.

Intel has focused its chip development on computing ability and now the firm isn't able to provide a chip with what is known as "good enough" power consumption for mobile devices.

"'Good-enough computing' has become a firm reality," said Jay Chou, an analyst at IDC, a research firm. "The real question PC vendors have to think hard about is how to enable a compelling user experience that can justify spending on the added horsepower." 

In 2010, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL)  sold 15 million iPads. In the United States, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) 's mobile computer sales, including iPad and Mac laptops, have surpassed that of Hewlett-Packard, the world's No. 1 PC maker.

In the past two weeks, Lenovo, RIM, Motorola and other companies have launched their own tablet computers in China. 

Acer was the latest to join them with a new line of tablet products unveiled last Friday. Most tablet products now feature ARM chip architecture and Qualcomm chips, though Apple uses its own chips. In short, Intel has been bypassed. 

The popularity of tablets and even smartphones is hurting PC sales, a segment that Intel heavily depends on at present. 

Global PC sales fell 1.1 percent in the first quarter compared with the same period last year, according to Gartner.

IDC estimates PC sales have fallen 3.2 percent because consumers are flocking to the newer mobile technologies. 

The consumer wave has not only hit Intel but other industry players who put their faith in Moore's Law.

Source: Shanghai Daily

System Integrators are monolithic creatures soon to become relics in this fast changing world.

You are not very smart if you’re running a Systems Integrator business or a professional services company. You either need to be super large global player (like Accenture), or a national icon (like Infosys) or you might as well get out of business. With project risks underwritten by large SI firms, the burden to deliver projects on time within budget is onerous. The perennial issue of project and scope creep is always there which erodes any profit margins, actual or imagined. And if you come from the old-school of giving the client superior customer service at any costs; it may really cost you an arm and a leg. Good luck!

Let’s face it – there is always someone who can deliver at a fraction of what it costs you internally. So it makes sense to outsource, right!  Given the time, everybody gets it right anyway. Besides, your client knows someone, a niece or cousin or somebody who can do it within a week for next to nothing. Seriously, I do believe them – there are real people living in India, Vietnam, China, Ukraine or the Philippines who can do it at unbelievable prices. The difference is so vast, you will begin to start asking, what’s our obsession with superior client services or CMMi Level 5 and all that jazz. There is one business maxim – ‘Businesses seek optimal returns’.

If you a marginal player in the industry, you become the price taker. In fact, even the large players are not immune from this problem. It is a matter of time arbitragers equalise any price premiums in the market place. Get out before it’s too late. 

In my next blog, I’ll discuss about where I think we are going to gravitate to in the near future.  i.e. where the money is!

Free2move announces wireless sensor-logger for humidity & temperature monitoring Addresses requirements for monitoring of buildings, machinery and sensitive goods

2011-04-15, Free2move Holdings AB

The Ison™ is a new member of Free2move’s FS800 family of ultra-low power wireless
sensor technologies with advanced sensor and logging capabilities. The sensor can
store up to 10,000 log-points with simultaneous humidity and temperature
measurements into its protected memory. Log-intervals are configurable and alert
threshold values are configurable. It is self-calibrating and maintenance free. In its
most advanced variant, it can provide battery life in excess of 30 years.
The small size of the Ison™ along with its wireless reporting of sensor data makes it
possible to conceal it within building structures, from where it can report humidity and
temperature variations. It may also be employed for the monitoring of warehouses,
transportation environment, healthcare, sports facilities as well as industrial
environments. Logged sensor data can be uploaded to USB, WiFi or LAN compliant
reading devices at a range of up to 100 metres (300 feet) in free air.
The Ison™ supports both on-demand reporting and alert reporting. On-demand
reports are mainly used for compliance verification and for statistical measurements.
Alert reports are used for operational rectification and preventive maintenance; for
instance to prevent dew-point issues in electrical installations.
“We are delighted that initial orders for the Ison™ have already been secured and the
product has started shipping”, says Martin Harnevie, Chief Executive of Free2move’s
RFID unit. “Strong interest has been received from the construction sector, marine
technology sectors, agriculture, consumer goods manufacturing, and healthcare.”
An evaluation and development kit for Ison™ is also available from Free2move.
About Free2move
There are two subsidiaries of Free2move Holding. Free2move AB is a global provider
of wireless audio communication products and Free2move Asia is a global provider of
wireless sensor and RFID technologies.

More information
For more information please see www.free2move.us. Or contact Martin Harnevie, +60
19 312 9026, martin@free2move.us or Per-Arne Wiberg, +46 702 20 33 82, perarne.
wiberg@free2move.se.

Intel press releases confirm Itanium roadmap committed

Intel press releases confirm Itanium roadmap committed

Oracle’s press release dated March 22nd stated “..Itanium was nearing the end of its life”. Really?

I would like to share Intel’s press releases for those of our readers whom have not seen the recent announcements.

• On Feb 17 (only five weeks prior to Oracle’s statement above), Intel released Poulson, offering 3.1 billion transistors, the most of any current microprocessor, to advance the Itanium architecture for the next decade of mission-critical computing. Here is the fact sheet and Intel contact information
  
  
• Intel further positions the Itanium roadmap in the press release on March 23. Kittson is an officially committed roadmap product for Itanium beyond Poulson and is also in active development.

Interestingly though, HP Integrity has the #1 market share in Singapore. Read my blog at http://bit.ly/eaUdqj and it is disappointing to learn that Oracle will no longer be releasing new versions on the Itanium platforms. There are alternatives, and it may be worth porting the apps and databases to DB2.

One thing I would like to state is that the Itanium has earned a reputation as a good DB workhorse and in fact I came across several entries when I was judging the finalist for the ISA Award 2010 - one of the telecom operators had migrated from SPARC to Itanium and reduced the number of servers and CPUs and even managed to increase the throughput at the same time.

The Itanium chipset still has a great price-performance value proposition from a server point of view and I am glad that Intel is committed to the Itanium roadmap.

HP (NYSE:HPQ) Integrity Systems #1 in Market Share

HP Integrity Servers has claimed the No. 1 spot in the Singapore UNIX market based on the IDC Q4 CY10 data!
At 40.7% market share in Q4, we are experiencing a 13.7% Year on Year 4Q share growth vs. CY2009!

HP continues to drive better price-performance ratio for business critical servers.

The Quality Continuum

Software quality, unlike beauty, can be measured and quantified. There are basic tenets in place - like maintainability, portability, scalability and so on. Somehow that notion has been completely replaced by over emphasizing on the form rather than the substance. What do I mean by this?

I was recently involved in a project executed by a CMMi level 5 company. The code was written in 2008/9 and the project went live in June 2009. In March this year the client wanted to do some enhancement work on the system. I was asked to come and look at the overall architecture of the system.

What was startling was that this project was executed by one of the largest and most prestigious IT vendors from where I am from. To start with, the program was delivered in 2009 with many bugs, had 13 *.sln files within a single system, 7 databases and 17 web-service solutions. My first reaction was - what is going on?

Soon I realized what the true problem was, the Internal QA was obsessed with the Project Management Plan ("PMP"), the Project Manager was scrutinizing the schedule to the last detail and the users were obsessing over the specification and nobody actually bothered with the real fundamentals - building software solutions that actually work.

While it is great to have a quality process in place - it is an unforgivable sin to compromise on the basics - code quality and design principals. The lesson learnt is that improvements in the maturity models such as CMM or CMMi's without corresponding improvements in the software quality assurance process can be counter productive.

Ironically, improving the process of poor coding standards makes the software quality unbearably lousy.

One of my first year University books was entitled, "The Arts and Science of Programming." Now, would you put Da Vinci through the CMMi process? I guess not....

Migration from legacy systems

I was recently on the panel of judges for the Itanium Solutions Award 2010. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of submissions for the Data Center Modernization award this year.

As all the finalist were of very high standards, and since all brought out the value of their Itanium deployment, I was looking out for a differentiator that would set them apart. Generally, I used the additional guidelines below:

- Improvements in processing power
- Reduction in CPU utilization running the same apps on the legacy vs the Itanium
- Reduction in the number of CPUs running the same apps on the legacy vs the Itanium
- Direct cost savings as a result (licenses, etc)
- Improvements in the management of the data center
- Ease of partitioning
- Ability to scale the database efficiently.
- Ability to migrate / upgrade the servers without impacting the business through minimal downtime.

I congratulate all the Finalists and Winners of ISA Award 2010