Jnan Dash

Yesterday’s announcement of Apple’s fourth quarter result for 2011 was astounding to say the least. Growth from a year-ago quarter was 118%. Sales for the quarter at $46.3 Billion yielded profit of $13.1B. Wow – that profit is more than 3 times what General Electric earned in its most recent quarter. These figures blew analysts’ projections. Apple’s cash hoard is $97.6B, more than the market capitalizations of all but 52 publicly traded companies. Today Apple’s shares are up around $450, making its market capitalization surpass Exxon Mobile. So Apple is the most valued corporation in the US and the world. This is significant as the founder and visionary leader of Apple Steve Jobs died last October. The momentum of sales continued even stronger than before. The new iPhone 4S sold briskly contributing to the total sales of 37M iPhones. Even the iPad sold 15.4 Million... (more)

The HP CEO Circus

HP just announced a new CEO, Meg Whitman after ousting Leo Apotheker who served less that a year as CEO.  During Leo’s time, HP’s market value went down by 44%. It is hard to believe HP’s market valuation hovers around $50B. Mark Hurd rescued HP after Carly Fiorina was kicked out by the board. Under her watch, HP made the biggest acquisition (Compaq). Mark cut costs and tightened operations to show better profitability. But innovation for which HP is known from the start, took a back seat. Last year Mark Hurd had to leave for inappropriate conduct. The board quickly appointed Le... (more)

The Next Web Architecture

I was listening to Roger McNamee’s predictions of technology investment trends and came across two new terms – Hypernet and Hyperweb. The first term is where the Internet is overlaid with smartphones. He says that smartphones are now 50% of the web devices and growing. The second term refers to the software infrastructure for the Hypernet. The current infrastructure of mostly “index search” (read Google) is not going to work for the Hypernet. We need HTML5. Here are his ten hypotheses for tech investing. Next Web Architecture = Hypernet + Hyperweb The decline and fall of Windows... (more)

Leadership at IBM – Sam Palmisano

Sam Palmisano took over IBM’s CEO role back in 2002 from Gerstner who was brought in to restore IBM from its historic decline during the early 1990s. I was an employee of IBM for 16 years until the year 1992. I left early in 1992 and by the end of the year people were asking me how did I know that such decline was coming. My answer was that I had no idea and I really agonized over the wisdom of leaving IBM, a great company by any measure. Palmisano went into the second phase of “value creation” and changing IBM’s course in several ways. He said that the world is instrumented, in... (more)

Information – Knowledge – Wisdom

As we usher into the new year, one thought keeps haunting me – how many hours are we spending in front of a screen, be it our smart-phone, tablets, laptop, desktop or TV? Gone are the simple joys of life – reading a book quietly, talking a walk without any distractions, or just being quiet. The average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV scre... (more)