Synergy is real. It can be measured and is important to horizontally diversified firms with economies of scope advantages. Don’t shudder.

I’m shuddering at the abuse of the term. I do think it exists because I can see it in computer technology and assume that it must exist in other fields as well. But you can’t just say “synergy” in a hand-wavey way to justify a huge merger, in my opinion. It’s just nuts.

The Microsoft-Yahoo thing, for instance. There wasn’t synergy, there was massive duplication. Much cheaper to licence Yahoo technology if you need it, or hire away their best and brightest. $40 billion in cash and debt? Nuts.

Sun have bought a few companies lately; most recently they bought a small firm that makes distributed filesystems as part of a push into the HPC market. That’s an example of synergy, because the technology they bought will become more potent when married to their own ZFS.

I suspect that portability of management skills would be on a continuum. And that the best managers are prepared to take advice. There was a great anecdote about Henry Ford wherein he said he was smart because he retained smart people.

Wharton grads are better. MBAs may be an example of a Giffen good.

Synergy is real. It can be measured and is important to horizontally diversified firms with economies of scope advantages. Don’t shudder.

But yes I still shudder when non economists say synergy or paradigm. Typically they mean “perpetual motion machine”, “money tree” or “panacea”.

I think that there is a degree of portability of skills, but this is reliant on tacit knowledge. Some managers have it and some don’t.

Donald Rumsfield was good in multiple management fields, but ultimately he made too many mistakes after some success as Defence Secretary. Mc Namara was good at both business and defence chief of the US.

Warren Buffet makes his money from understanding good management when it comes in. But he couldn’t run a bank (even as a finance guy) and sold it off.

I don’t know. There’s lots of places they have potential *shudder* synergy, but in terms of branding and culture … I dunno. At this stage they are able to cooperate through cross-pollination of technology, which I think is the best bet for now.

On the other hand, I think my point about Sun stands: without the fruits of deep R&D they’d be well and truly up a creek filled with manure right now.

I suppose I meant I see Sun today as Apple around the time Steve Jobs came in as the “temporary CEO” in the dark days of 96-99.

That suggests Sun will need some kind of breakout product like the ipod to survive rather than slowly becoming irrelevent through a decreasing ability to innovate. If my recent dealings with the local arm of Sun are any sign, they seriously need to ditch their resellers, and pronto, and move to direct sales. Some of Suns resellers still seem to think it’s 1988 and they’ve got a hot product no-one else has a competitor for, despite Sun increasingly moving to commodity hardware.

It’s possible to be a pure commodity manufacturer in IT these days, as Dell and HP demonstrate. But there’s very few companies who can compete in that space and the margins are atrocious. You need to be first or second for it to work and you never get to leapfrog the competition on features because you rely on the same upstream technologies as they do.

I see Sun as the Apple of the server space at the moment — struggling to come back, but with a really neato portfolio of technology that will bring them back into the spotlight. They captured a lot of geek mindshare with ZFS in particular, and that will pay out down the road in datacentre purchasing decisions.

If she runs his campaign as well as she ran HP, Obama’s a shoo-in.

The stocks highs were the day before she took the job. It was a long set of stairs down finally to the firms net asset value.

I have him on my feed reader. His stuff only turns up every few weeks but is usually quite thought provoking. I really must get off my bum and get some shares.

her advice will be for McCain to stop talking about his Vietnam experiences and outsource all of his war memories to Jim Webb

lol. If she runs his campaign as well as she ran HP, Obama’s a shoo-in.

Thanks for the reminder about Schwartz’s blog btw. I’ve read it a couple of times in the past and he’s a very interesting bloke.

It’s a lot more reliable than it used to be — it’s overtaking spinning media in terms of MBTF because of write-levelling. In any case ZFS is able to recover pretty handily from errors.

Its main advantage is that it’s solid-state, so it reads and writes faster and uses far, far less power. You don’t need to keep it spinning for one.

Andrew;

I did not. Going on past form, her advice will be for McCain to stop talking about his Vietnam experiences and outsource all of his war memories to Jim Webb.

re power. I did some work for a large ex fully gov owned au. telco last year - new 3G - big problem with air con and power supply in existing exchanges all around the nation. Big problem was getting old skool designers and engineers to recognise unbelievable ramping up of data demands with mobiles –> power needs.

re flash - I was under the impression that flash was a bit unreliable but is that related to the cheap hardware?

Schwartz is the first CEO in history to link to source code in a blog entry talking about his company’s technology.

Jacques you geek.

Time to get back to irc.oz.org:6667 #coders

ut the rising tide of data means that purchase cost is becoming dominated by the price of the electricity to run datacentres — the trendline of dollars per gigabyte maintained is crossing with the dollars per gigabyte purchased.

really, so the cost of energy has become a big enough factor? huh?