5 posts and columns on commodity

Accel's Ping Li Compares the Cloud to the Mainframe

in Enterprise on January 18, 2011 at 7:00 am PT

If Cloud Computing winds up being the computing platform of the future, it will need a lot of the same pieces that mainframes did. And it’s in those layers where Li looks for opportunities.

Investor Jitters a Factor in Failed Seagate Deal

in News on December 2, 2010 at 1:22 pm PT

A few years ago, former Seagate Technology PLC Chief Executive Bill Watkins made an analogy comparing the hard-disk industry to Rodney Dangerfield. “I think it’s unfair not to respect a commodity,” Watkins told Newsweek in 2007. “There’s a tremendous amount of technology in this commodity.”

No Matter How Hard You Try, You Can’t Get Apple to Say Anything Nice About a Netbook

in Media on July 21, 2009 at 3:32 pm PT

This is now an Apple earnings-call tradition: Analysts try their hardest to convince Apple executives to express interest in the booming market for cheap netbooks and Apple executives make it perfectly clear how much disdain they have for netbooks. But an $800 iTablet? That’s something else altogether…
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Apple: Steve Jobs Is Still Fine, and We Still Hate Netbooks

in Media on April 22, 2009 at 3:07 pm PT

Next to no news from the Apple earnings call this afternoon, which is just the way Apple execs like their earnings calls. Once again, the company provided no information about CEO Steve Jobs’s health except to note that he is still scheduled to come back to work in June. And the company continued to pooh-pooh the concept of netbooks–supercheap, supersmall laptops with very little horsepower that are the hottest part of the PC business right now.