“Where’s the Taurus?” In the history of company turnarounds, it was one of the most penetrating and catalyzing opening questions ever offered by a new CEO to a demoralized executive team. The CEO was Alan Mullaly, who spent years at Boeing and at one point in the 1980s studied the successful rollout of the original Ford Taurus. For… Read More
Broadcom’s Bet the Company Acquisition of Netlogic
I surmised a month ago that Broadcom could be a likely acquirer of TI’s OMAP business in order to compete more effectively in Smart Phones and Tablets. I was not bold enough. Instead, Broadcom has offered $3.7B for Netlogic in order to be an even bigger player in the communications infrastructure market by picking up TCAMs and a family… Read More
Apple’s $399 Plan to Win Consumer Market in Summer 2012
The complete destruction of the consumer PC market in the US and Europe is well within Apple’s grasp and will begin to unfold next summer. There is nothing that Intel, Microsoft or the retail channels can do to hold back the tsunami that was first set in motion with the iPad last year and comes to completion with the introduction of one… Read More
Magic Media Tablet: illusion about a niche market?
According with ABI research, worldwide annual media tablet shipments are expected to top 120 million units in 2015, which is more than decent for a niche market. But if you compare it with the smartphone market (you can find the smartphone shipments forecast here), media tablet will weight 15% in unit shipment of the smartphone … Read More
HP, Palm, tablets, PCs, smartphones
Hewlett-Packard purchased Palm last year for over a billion dollars primarily to get their hands on the WebOS operating system for powering its tablets and smartphones. It’s turned out to be much too little too late. Despite WebOS being a new operating system with many attractive features, HP’s tablet offering, … Read More
Mr. TTL’s Future is Analog: Time to Sell OMAP to Broadcom
Mr. TTL (otherwise known as Texas Instruments or TI) has had a great run in the cellular market but it is time to decamp. The future is Analog and OMAP must depart to one of the remaining players looking to win the Smartphone and Tablet market. TI is exiting the market so it can focus on the high volume analog market.
On first sight, the … Read More
Captain Ahab Calls Out for the Merger of nVidia and AMD
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago –in the mid 1990s – having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail the startup ship Cyrix and see the watery part of the PC world. Whenever I find myself grim about the mouth or pause before coffin warehouses, and bring up the rear of every funeral… Read More
Google buying Motorola
So Google is buying Motorola Mobility for $12.5B. If you are a partner of Google using Android then this has both upside and downside. The upside is that Motorola, having been in wireless for longer than almost anyone, presumably has a pretty good patent portfolio that can be used to defend against Apple, Nokia, Microsoft et al. The… Read More
Current State of Tablet Products
Tablets are hot items these days. There is exuberance about the speed of application processors, size of the internal memory, capabilities of the operating systems, WiFi or 3G/4G connectivity, quality of the display, cameras megapixels, battery life, tablet weight, etc. All of these features are very important, no question… Read More
Samsung to Acquire AMD?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of AMD, I buy AMD based products whenever possible to prevent an innovation stifling Intel monopoly. Unfortunately Silicon Valley coffee house conversations continue to paint a bleak picture for AMD, even with a recent stock surge on better than expected revenue guidance for the rest of 2011. I’m… Read More
Next Generation of Systems Design at Siemens