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Apple Sells One Millionth iPhone
Apple today announced it sold its one millionth iPhone yesterday, 74 days after its introduction on June 29.
By brent@ranchero.com
Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:56:17 GMT
Copyright 2008 Weblogs, Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only.
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Summertime Thoughts…..
Twenty years ago I was at the San Diego super computer center. Their mega-machine of the day was a twenty foot long three ton flashing light box that looked stunning like the “whopper” from War games. Anyway, what’s interesting is that the demonstration they showed me was how the 1000 or so processors in the whopper could work together to create a 3D rendering of a person’s face and head from a photograph. To prove this point, they had a sealed lathe type machine connected to the whopper that cut small pieces out of a block of paper for 9 hours until a bust of W.C. Fields became apparent. I can remember how cool I thought that was. At the time, forward looking animation companies such as Disney rented time on the whopper to do cool stuff like that at a zillion dollars an hour.
Last week I went to the dentist to have my 84th (or so) crown shoved into my mercury filled mouth. A crown is a fake tooth made from ceramic. I was stunned when the dentist (Dr. Guyle Morris, dentist to the stars – and one of those guys who absolutely insists on asking you questions – mostly about cars – while you have 14 things jammed into your mouth along with a totally numb face) took some funky pictures and started “crafting” my tooth on a 3D workstation. Ten minutes later, a water cooled gizmo the size of a microwave oven starts cutting up a block of ceramic – exactly like the W.C. Fields bust. Ten minutes after that, I had a new crown.
It was a good example of the lifecycle of technologies and how eventually they end up in the dentist office. The whopper probably cost $50,000,000. The 3D workstation and water tooth lathe gizmo probably cost $200,000. The fact that I was able to get my crown in one appointment vs. two – priceless. More interesting perhaps is that there was most likely more CPU power inside the dentist workstation by an order of magnitude then in the whopper. I wonder if he could have made a W.C. Fields face on the crown. You know that will be the next “bling” thing. It will be like scrimshaw on your teeth – pictures of Tupac and Biggie on your choppers. Sweet.
Speaking of high-tech advancements that take way too long, I finally got to see and hear the Steve Sicola story. Sicola was a DEC storage engineer from the Mark Lewis, Richie/Ellen Larry genre who went to Compaq and ended up at Seagate. Sicola and team wanted to build a bigger “brick” than just a disk drive – a sled of disk drives where failure of one (or more) became a “who cares?” moment and where all lower level function could occur autonomically (like RAID). Surprisingly (I say mockingly, as I told him et al 53 years ago that OEM’s would barf on the idea), OEM’s barfed on the idea. Seeing how Seagate makes roughly 100% of its revenue and profit on those OEM’s, it didn’t take a genius to figure out a new play was required. Enter Xiotech, who was owned by Seagate and subsequently spun out for pretty much the exact same reasons, as a perfect place to take the Sicola project to some commercial level.
Now the stuff is out and it’s way cool. The brick has 12 disks (I think, might be 10) – and they have figured out all the vibration, airflow, etc. problems that plague SATA disks, internal error checking, etc. They stripe across all the disks so they can get the performance consistency and linear scale folks like, in a pretty much disposable package (you chuck it after 5 years or so). A package like this ends up being even cheaper when you consider that you almost always will toss out your investment well before it’s depreciated, and as such you have to write it down. This method makes it kind of time-proof since you know the exact expected performance/availability capabilities on day 2000 that you do on day 1. In the wild and wacky Web 2.0 world, that’s a good thing to know.
I think I’ll be attending the Trusted Infrastructure Technologies Conference in October in China. Cloud computing and data infrastructure is a way cool wave right now – but I’ve been wondering how it ever really garner true corporate success without the ability for those using it to be able to prove the security and integrity of the data assets that exist in the cloud. This initiative is built around that concept – how do you prove multi-tenancy infrastructure outside of your control is doing what it is supposed to be doing? Even in internal/intranet based cloud initiatives, you should still be concerned about being able to prove that your multi-tenancy utility is meeting all the assumptive functions it should. When you can do that the entire issue of “I want my own infrastructure” can go away finally. If we can prove it in the cloud, we can certainly prove it on our intranet. At that point, we can really start building utility infrastructures and stop stove piping everything. It may not matter to us if someone can hack into the pictures of my kids pet turtle, but it will if you want my 401K data housed out on your shared site……
The categories displayed in research for the last 25 years or so that help us delineate between “customer types” are another example of “things we still use because that’s the way we’ve always done this” – that no longer makes any sense. In a recent internal research review our team presented their finding by “accepted nomenclature” – i.e. companies with more than 5000 employees = X and companies with more than $1B in revenue = y.
The reality is those are meaningless metrics today. If you are trying to understand and categorize a market for IT products or services, the only company who cares how many employees someone has is a company who sells individual seat licenses or products – so it might be good for Microsoft or Dell, but it doesn’t tell you jack about 98% of the things I care about. There are plenty of companies with less than 100 employees and little to no revenue who are massive consumers of storage and servers. How does one characterize MySpace or FaceBook in the old way of looking at things? Is Google considered the same type of IT shop as the rest of the Fortune 500? I think not. If you are going to sell IT stuff to the world, then the only legitimate way to make comparisons is to get very basic – and I suggest that means servers. It doesn’t even really matter if it is physical or virtual (as more and more will become virtual) – servers support applications that support users, processes, and other applications. If you understand server growth, you get a better picture of the company’s growth. We know when a company goes from 25 servers to 200 over two years that that should be a company on our radar screen. If their employee count went from 50-200 in that time frame you probably wouldn’t pay attention.
By brent@ranchero.com
Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:56:17 GMT
Copyright 2008 Weblogs, Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only.
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