Time’s Up: Let’s Fix EFA
I think Electronic Frontiers Australia needs a major shakeup if it’s going to survive, let alone thrive. Read More
Category: MBA
The Eigencast 021: Productivity Through People
Justin talks to Yadin Porter de León about managing people. Read More
Why SWOT Sucks
SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) continues to be popular for some reason, and it’s great, because it gives me a very fast way to figure out that someone doesn’t know what they’re doing. It saves me time, and that’s lovely. SWOT is conceptually simple to understand, which is also… Read More
Tech Companies With An OPiuM Problem, Part 1
My strategy professor in business school had an amusing phrase to describe companies who take on too much external funding. He said they had an “OPM” problem: Other People’s Money. The issue with taking Other People’s Money is that, usually, they want it back. With interest. It’s basically how the… Read More
AWS Financials Available. So Now What?
Last week we saw Amazon break out their AWS numbers as a separate segment for the first time, so of course, the entire tech press lost their collective minds and wrote reams about it. It’s bigger than we thought! It’s smaller than we thought! They have margin! OMG. I’ve previously… Read More
Flash Costs and Dedupe
Okay flash storage vendors, enough is enough. Several of you have been trying desperately to convince people that flash is cheap enough to replace spinning disk by measuring it wrong. You keep trying to compare the price of deduped flash with raw spinning disk, and that’s just silly. What Even… Read More
VFD4 Prep: Commvault
What a difference 18 months makes. I last reviewed Commvault for Tech Field Day 9 in June 2013 in a series of posts. My post-TFD9 review focused on their new-at-the-time Sympana 10 release, but prior to the event, I did some old-fashioned financial analysis, since they’re a public company and… Read More
Tech Company Breakups
Multiple tech companies are in the news lately because they’re splitting off parts of themselves. HP, Symantec, and eBay are all splitting off major sections, and there’s speculation about EMC splitting off VMware, and maybe Cisco doing something similar. There was also a conversation about the topic on this week’s… Read More
SFD5 Prep Work: Sandisk
Sandisk are the other public company presenting at Storage Field. Their financial statements tell a very different story from those of EMC that we discussed previously. Check this out: That’s a pretty bumpy ride through the GFC. Here’s what it did for investors, in terms of Return on Equity: Ouch.… Read More
SFD5 Prep Work: EMC
Welcome to the first instalment of my now-traditional pre-Tech Field Day event prep work! First up is EMC. I’ve picked EMC first for two reasons: firstly, they’re one of only two publicly listed companies we’ll be talking to as part of SFD5, and secondly, because they’re huge and have many… Read More