Yea, I remember Balmer dissing the iPhone. "So what so they sell a million phones. WE have the OS in millions of phones"
So we fast forward a few years and there are what, 30 million or so iPhones out there at $600 a crack to Apple and if I remember correctly iPhone installed base just surpassed phones with Windows Mobile in them. Yea.... right. Well they are not perfect but for me I think I would like Apple's revenue per phone much more than Windows Mobile but what the hell, gives Steve another reason to kick some more chairs.
Having worked 28 some years in the semiconductor industry grinding out chips for PC's the story sounds SOOOooooo familiar.
"It's just this time...honest....just give up your entire personal life.... your wife and kids will love you for it cause we are just going to rain cash and kudo's on you"
Fast forward 2 years later...
"Ok, so my wife left me, my kids hate me and now your telling me my bonus went to the CEO and his butt buddies on the board because they needed something to light their cigars with and now your laying me off because we missed the market because you couldn't make up your friggin mind what you wanted and we all killed ourselves for you for nothing? Do I understand this right?"
Sux don't it?
I feel fortunate to have stashed just enough away to moon them all Ace Ventura style and walk away. Those in this kind of mess really have to ask themselves what is REALLY important. Those that run places like this which is 90% of corporate business these days don't give a rat's ass about you. Employees are an expense to be reduced not an asset to be valued. Think you are not replaceable. Put you hand into a bucket of water and pull it out and see how fast that hole fills up. That is the reality. If you really like that work more than life itself, then that is what you should do but if not..... you might just want to look around.
Ah, shades of Armageddon. That wonderful movie where they so realistically portray space missions so weight critical that they bring friggin miniguns along with them. What they really need is some space faring Sharks with Lasers on their heads. That should fix it!!!!!
No add ons at all but google toolbar which gets hosed every time you try to make it larger. Never remembers tabs even though it says it is going to. Crashes like crazy. Back to 3.0 with no problems at all.
Oh, and given at those dimensions quantum noise (e^KT/q) will be greater in signal strength than a 1 or 0 level I am interested to see just how this works.
I'd love to see it but for the moment it's just numbers on a slide. About a gazzilion dollars in research are needed to get to those dimensions.
Yes, it was, as the Chinese Philosopher said, interesting times. I felt very privileged to work at VLSI Technology. I can honestly say that for either before or after with maybe one exception, did I have the opportunity to work with a finer complete group of people. The Fab, the tools group and my chip set group were a collection of very amazing talent. Unfortunately the captain at the helm ran us into the ground, and that was a damn shame. It left we me with fond memories of the individuals, but bitter feelings toward upper management and the whole semi industry as a whole. I'm out of that business now and I can't say as I miss it, just the people.
I don't necessarily disagree (read my last sentence) but you don't get advance spec books because you ask. You enter into contracts and agreements. You act or should act as partners. If they wanted out, fine. Say so. Don't bend your partner over and do it up their respective rear ends and say , "Hey, its just business". Tony Saprano likes to say that to. Doesn't make it right.
It is not like we did not suspect what was going on, you are just powerless to do anything about it. Us engineers in the trenches as well as the marketing types KNEW we were going to get screwed and kept telling mgmt we needed to get out and start doing something else. They on the other hand kept thinking the cash trough was bottomless and waived us off. Thats ok. Our division GM was soundly punished for his lack of insight and directional guidance. The company forced him to allow them to buy back his house in Phoenix and forced him to allow them to move him back to Texas. The rest of us slackers had it easy, all they did was kick our asses out the door. Duh....
I was the Director of Engineering for VLSI Technology's PC Chip set division back in the 80's. Back in those days, there were dozens of companies making chip sets for Intel CPU's and Intel, surprising as it may sound, did not. The chip set business was interesting in that it started with C&T. Zymos was second and VLSI was third. By the time we got into it, and in particular, after we were picked by IBM to be their chip set provider, the bay area VC market must have been swamped with business plans of every dog and his brother wanting to start a chip company making chip sets. If you can remember too, there were hundreds and I do mean hundreds of PC companies. Fast forward a few years. Things are now pretty crazy. VLSI made it to be the top chip set supplier but the competition was intense. The hundreds of PC companies has now fallen to around 10-12. The dozens of chip set companies has fallen to 4 or 5 but still no Intel. This is around the time that the Pentium first made its debut. Now, to make a chip set, you need these very important things called "Yellow Books" ( maybe they were Red.... hmm that was a few years ago) . These are the specifications of the next CPU from a "certain" CPU manufacturer. Without the yellow books, you can't make a chip set because you have no idea what the memory interface is going to look like. If you don't know the memory or peripheral interface you can't make a north bridge for sure and your south bridge is going to be a hack. Soooooo, it was at this time that we were working on our next generation chip set for the Pentium. We were going crazy because, for some very strange reason, we had yet to get the "Yellow Books". We could and did make educated guesses as to what the memory interface should be but we did not know for sure what it would look like. Well you know what? Gee, like magic, Intel announces and samples their Triton chipset. (Which we taught them in large part how to make pursuing a CF called Polar and Draco with Intel, but that is another story.... I digress) And Andy G. tells the press how Intel was just "forced" into making their own chip sets because the external chip set vendors just could not keep up. Oh yea, gee wizzz, we get the specs the same week you sample and yea, we just can't keep up can we. Where it really got interesting is when we got our chipset out and our sales team was trying to sell to our customers, which now as I said is a VERY short list, it seems a certain "I" company was bundling their chip sets with their CPU's. You, as a PC company, "could" buy just CPU's from them for price A or you could buy CPU's + Chip set for price B. I let you guess which was the larger. Oh, yea, and if you selected the A option. They ( the "I" company) could not guarantee delivery.
So, we went from $250M/year in sales to $25M/year in sales in 12 months. Our division was decimated. I have never seen anything, short of last Octobers stock market, fall so hard and so fast.
In retrospect, I don't blame Intel for getting into the chip set business. Hell, I am surprised actually it took them as long as it did but both the tactics they used, and quite frankly, the stupidity of the upper management at VLSI laid waste to an incredible group of people, and at the time, a great place to work. Ah, well. That's competition. It was fun while it lasted.
No, that you can find a bundled PC less than a Mac I have no doubt. What survey companies use for statistics is another story. Apple ONLY sells complete computers. Dell, HP, et.al. ALL sell a box then you pick a monitor and what ever. Claiming a $500 delta in ASP between Dell and Apple is simply not the same thing. If the survey used a bundled price including a monitor then it would have more meaning. I can't tell, and quite frankly I don't care to research what they used. I'm simply stating without knowing the criteria of the research report it is pretty meaningless.
As for apps, everything I need runs on a Mac. I'm happy. Your happy. That there is a market to serve both needs is a good thing not a bad one.
Unless I miss my guess, the PC ASP is for a box. No monitor, no camera, no sound, just a box. A Mac has everything you need built it in plus you don't have to suffer their damn UI. I make a reasonable living keeping Vista boxes up. At home, I'm a Mac. If my customers had the reliability I have at home with my Mac's I'd be out of business. But thanks to Steve and his POS products, lots of us IT people are gainfully employed.
There was a lawsuit by the main shareholders that sued the board. Seems the board thought it fine to pay the company council 10 million to settle the lawsuit with Intel. Something that only took 10 months to do. Million a month. Sounds fair to me. Must have worked at Lehman Brothers before this gig.
At my wifes school system they don't count the ratio of people to IT but more systems. All systems combined, desktops, laptops, Dana's, etc they have over 20K systems. They have 4 full time IT staff people. Do the math. Needless to say......nothing but fires get put out.
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Yea, I remember Balmer dissing the iPhone. "So what so they sell a million phones. WE have the OS in millions of phones"
So we fast forward a few years and there are what, 30 million or so iPhones out there at $600 a crack to Apple and if I remember correctly iPhone installed base just surpassed phones with Windows Mobile in them. Yea.... right. Well they are not perfect but for me I think I would like Apple's revenue per phone much more than Windows Mobile but what the hell, gives Steve another reason to kick some more chairs.
Love their products in general. MacPro and MacBook user myself but I hate their mice and their keyboards. They both have always sucked.
The Lisa sucked big time. As did Newton but ... they paved the way for future products some by Apple some not that were quite successful.
No guts no glory. They at least stick their neck out there and try things. Sometimes it does not always work.
Just say NO to Micro$oft
Me I run OSX and FC8 thank you very much.
Come on, if your going to do worthless things why not go for the whole enchilada?
Having worked 28 some years in the semiconductor industry grinding out chips for PC's the story sounds SOOOooooo familiar.
"It's just this time...honest....just give up your entire personal life.... your wife and kids will love you for it cause we are just going to rain cash and kudo's on you"
Fast forward 2 years later...
"Ok, so my wife left me, my kids hate me and now your telling me my bonus went to the CEO and his butt buddies on the board because they needed something to light their cigars with and now your laying me off because we missed the market because you couldn't make up your friggin mind what you wanted and we all killed ourselves for you for nothing? Do I understand this right?"
Sux don't it?
I feel fortunate to have stashed just enough away to moon them all Ace Ventura style and walk away. Those in this kind of mess really have to ask themselves what is REALLY important. Those that run places like this which is 90% of corporate business these days don't give a rat's ass about you. Employees are an expense to be reduced not an asset to be valued. Think you are not replaceable. Put you hand into a bucket of water and pull it out and see how fast that hole fills up. That is the reality. If you really like that work more than life itself, then that is what you should do but if not..... you might just want to look around.
Ah, shades of Armageddon. That wonderful movie where they so realistically portray space missions so weight critical that they bring friggin miniguns along with them. What they really need is some space faring Sharks with Lasers on their heads. That should fix it!!!!!
What are these companies running on besides fumes?
Here it is at last
Looks like Solaris OS
And we need this why?
No add ons at all but google toolbar which gets hosed every time you try to make it larger. Never remembers tabs even though it says it is going to. Crashes like crazy. Back to 3.0 with no problems at all.
Been using 3.5 on OSX. Works like crap. Downgraded back to 3.0 and issues went away.
... besides wishful thinking?
Oh, and given at those dimensions quantum noise (e^KT/q) will be greater in signal strength than a 1 or 0 level I am interested to see just how this works.
I'd love to see it but for the moment it's just numbers on a slide. About a gazzilion dollars in research are needed to get to those dimensions.
Yes, it was, as the Chinese Philosopher said, interesting times. I felt very privileged to work at VLSI Technology. I can honestly say that for either before or after with maybe one exception, did I have the opportunity to work with a finer complete group of people. The Fab, the tools group and my chip set group were a collection of very amazing talent. Unfortunately the captain at the helm ran us into the ground, and that was a damn shame. It left we me with fond memories of the individuals, but bitter feelings toward upper management and the whole semi industry as a whole. I'm out of that business now and I can't say as I miss it, just the people.
I don't necessarily disagree (read my last sentence) but you don't get advance spec books because you ask. You enter into contracts and agreements. You act or should act as partners. If they wanted out, fine. Say so. Don't bend your partner over and do it up their respective rear ends and say , "Hey, its just business". Tony Saprano likes to say that to. Doesn't make it right.
It is not like we did not suspect what was going on, you are just powerless to do anything about it. Us engineers in the trenches as well as the marketing types KNEW we were going to get screwed and kept telling mgmt we needed to get out and start doing something else. They on the other hand kept thinking the cash trough was bottomless and waived us off. Thats ok. Our division GM was soundly punished for his lack of insight and directional guidance. The company forced him to allow them to buy back his house in Phoenix and forced him to allow them to move him back to Texas. The rest of us slackers had it easy, all they did was kick our asses out the door. Duh....
I was the Director of Engineering for VLSI Technology's PC Chip set division back in the 80's. Back in those days, there were dozens of companies making chip sets for Intel CPU's and Intel, surprising as it may sound, did not. The chip set business was interesting in that it started with C&T. Zymos was second and VLSI was third. By the time we got into it, and in particular, after we were picked by IBM to be their chip set provider, the bay area VC market must have been swamped with business plans of every dog and his brother wanting to start a chip company making chip sets. If you can remember too, there were hundreds and I do mean hundreds of PC companies. Fast forward a few years. Things are now pretty crazy. VLSI made it to be the top chip set supplier but the competition was intense. The hundreds of PC companies has now fallen to around 10-12. The dozens of chip set companies has fallen to 4 or 5 but still no Intel. This is around the time that the Pentium first made its debut. Now, to make a chip set, you need these very important things called "Yellow Books" ( maybe they were Red.... hmm that was a few years ago) . These are the specifications of the next CPU from a "certain" CPU manufacturer. Without the yellow books, you can't make a chip set because you have no idea what the memory interface is going to look like. If you don't know the memory or peripheral interface you can't make a north bridge for sure and your south bridge is going to be a hack. Soooooo, it was at this time that we were working on our next generation chip set for the Pentium. We were going crazy because, for some very strange reason, we had yet to get the "Yellow Books". We could and did make educated guesses as to what the memory interface should be but we did not know for sure what it would look like. Well you know what? Gee, like magic, Intel announces and samples their Triton chipset. (Which we taught them in large part how to make pursuing a CF called Polar and Draco with Intel, but that is another story.... I digress) And Andy G. tells the press how Intel was just "forced" into making their own chip sets because the external chip set vendors just could not keep up. Oh yea, gee wizzz, we get the specs the same week you sample and yea, we just can't keep up can we. Where it really got interesting is when we got our chipset out and our sales team was trying to sell to our customers, which now as I said is a VERY short list, it seems a certain "I" company was bundling their chip sets with their CPU's. You, as a PC company, "could" buy just CPU's from them for price A or you could buy CPU's + Chip set for price B. I let you guess which was the larger. Oh, yea, and if you selected the A option. They ( the "I" company) could not guarantee delivery.
So, we went from $250M/year in sales to $25M/year in sales in 12 months. Our division was decimated. I have never seen anything, short of last Octobers stock market, fall so hard and so fast.
In retrospect, I don't blame Intel for getting into the chip set business. Hell, I am surprised actually it took them as long as it did but both the tactics they used, and quite frankly, the stupidity of the upper management at VLSI laid waste to an incredible group of people, and at the time, a great place to work. Ah, well. That's competition. It was fun while it lasted.
what a bunch of asshats
I'm feeling better..... really
No your not, your dead.
.. and what can we do to stop him!!!
or her
or it
or them
or they
or ... no wait. It's me AAAAAAAAAhhhhhhhhhhhh
No, that you can find a bundled PC less than a Mac I have no doubt. What survey companies use for statistics is another story. Apple ONLY sells complete computers. Dell, HP, et.al. ALL sell a box then you pick a monitor and what ever. Claiming a $500 delta in ASP between Dell and Apple is simply not the same thing. If the survey used a bundled price including a monitor then it would have more meaning. I can't tell, and quite frankly I don't care to research what they used. I'm simply stating without knowing the criteria of the research report it is pretty meaningless.
As for apps, everything I need runs on a Mac. I'm happy. Your happy. That there is a market to serve both needs is a good thing not a bad one.
Unless I miss my guess, the PC ASP is for a box. No monitor, no camera, no sound, just a box. A Mac has everything you need built it in plus you don't have to suffer their damn UI. I make a reasonable living keeping Vista boxes up. At home, I'm a Mac. If my customers had the reliability I have at home with my Mac's I'd be out of business. But thanks to Steve and his POS products, lots of us IT people are gainfully employed.
Stupid is as stupid does.
OK, so am I the only one surprised at this, and given their HUGE market share, who in their right mind would want one?
They are going to make crappy commercials staring Bill with has-been comedians.
/. ed already.
There was a lawsuit by the main shareholders that sued the board. Seems the board thought it fine to pay the company council 10 million to settle the lawsuit with Intel. Something that only took 10 months to do. Million a month. Sounds fair to me. Must have worked at Lehman Brothers before this gig.
At my wifes school system they don't count the ratio of people to IT but more systems. All systems combined, desktops, laptops, Dana's, etc they have over 20K systems. They have 4 full time IT staff people. Do the math. Needless to say......nothing but fires get put out.