Author: Rob Enderle

Governance is critical to every company and operation. Whether we are talking IT, accounting, manufacturing, or especially sales, assuring that employees’ behavior and company assets aren’t being misused, and employees aren’t being abused, is critical to the successful operation of the entity. Having been in internal audit teams and often failing to fix known problems because calling out the problem is career limiting (even for someone in the relatively well-protected audit department), watching Facebook’s board struggle with Facebook behavior has been painful. And, in this instance, it isn’t that Facebook’s Oversight Board lacks competence or the will to make a…

Whenever there is a significant technology change, the first iterations often try to emulate what came before. The first cars looked a lot like horse-drawn carriages without the horses and were called Horseless Carriages. Over a considerable number of decades, they’ve evolved to a point where they are now optimized for what they are, not what their horse-drawn predecessors were. With the current wave of electric vehicles (EVs), Tesla’s pretty much looked the same as internal combustion engine (ICE) cars even though they didn’t need space in front for motors. Later cars, like the Jaguar I-PACE, had a more cab-forward…

Targeted PCs are rare, and I think that is a generic mistake made by OEMs who shotgun out many different PCs with little knowledge of who will use them. Apple, who should be focused on creators, has created a far simpler line but treats everyone as if they had the same job and workload. Many vendors use “personas” to design PCs, but as the book Technically Wrong points out, that approach often creates products targeting people that don’t exist. For instance, given that male engineers typically define these personas, it shouldn’t be a surprise that PCs focused on women don’t…

Sustainability isn’t just good for the environment. It is excellent for the bottom line. Virtually every major vendor has been able to connect substantial extra business to their sustainability efforts. For HP, this number is over $1B. This benefit appears to result from the sustainability efforts of vendor customers who require their suppliers to be as sustainable or more than they are. These sustainability efforts may seem competitive, but in many ways, they are often cooperative so that the costs can be shared and the results multiplied. In September, HP provided an update on their progress. HP is the most…

The positioning of the IBM Cloud offering is very different from its peers. IBM doesn’t position it as an alternative, but as a secure premium offering that could be used to address an unmet security, privacy, or compliance need in a multi-cloud deployment. One of the things IBM does better than most is use advocates who have deployed a product to explain in their own words why they chose IBM. There is nothing more compelling in my mind than an advocate that backed up that advocacy with their own money. It often makes me wonder about those that compete in…

The concept of “hostile workplace” appears to be at the heart of Salesforce announcing they will fund the relocation of any employee that finds the new Texas law restricting abortion objectionable. It is interesting that Benioff, Salesforce’s president, didn’t just apply this to female employees and that the initial release didn’t specify Texas but “any State.” While, typically, talking about any company making a statement like this wouldn’t indicate a potential trend yet, Salesforce is a company that instruments employees and customers at scale, making them far more likely to be the proverbial “canary in a coalmine” concerning employee care…

One of the ongoing annoyances when buying a new car is that its technology can be as much as ten years old. The out-of-date technology problem is particularly annoying when looking at relatively expensive cars like a Lamborghini or Audi R8, which often use old Audi entertainment technology in their latest cars. I’ve walked out of dealerships where I’d intended to buy after realizing the in-car entertainment system was already years out of date and not upgradable. This inability to update technology is potentially a far more significant problem with autonomous vehicles where the technology, and therefore relative safety, are…

AMD just got an impressive win for the Polaris Supercomputer, designed to create a testing prototype for the coming Intel-based Aurora supercomputer. This Aurora supercomputer will be doing critical work on cancer research, creating more ecologically friendly biofuels, and expanding the frontiers of physics, including the search for dark matter. This effort will be critical or our understanding of high-profile threats like deadly diseases and global warming, but what I find fascinating is that it will also require collaboration between Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA to make it work. That collaboration could lead to even greater HPC (high performance computing) efforts…

From the 80s through the 90s, Microsoft didn’t take security seriously. They acted as if it was someone else’s job, and companies like Symantec and McAfee came to market and flourished. But, to flourish and sell their security offerings on Windows, the security company had to increasingly disparage the product they were securing—Windows. In the early 2000s, Microsoft had had enough, and they bought their security firm and began to focus on securing their platforms more aggressively. As time went on and Satya Nadella put his brand on the company, Microsoft put even more resources on security. It now appears…

Recently, Qualcomm announced an effort with Spoke to put their Cellular Vehicle-to-everything (C-VTX) technology on bikes, scooters, and motorcycles. This move is so that future cars, autonomous or not, would be better able to see and avoid accidents with these vehicles. Certainly important, but cars share the road with lots of things, pedestrians, pets, endangered species, construction vehicles, older non-connected cars, and even horses and buggies. On Nextdoor, hearing about the tragic end to a pet is almost as bad as the near-daily reports of pedestrians and bike riders hit and killed by cars. The deaths of small children who…