What the Heck Is the Midrange, Anyway?
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is a story we hear again and again from the IT vendors: They are going to double down and make aggressive moves into the small and medium business space because the growth rates for IT spending are higher than they are among larger enterprises, at least when those businesses are all lumped together. To many of us, who remember the minicomputer revolution and who know a thing or two about the midrange market, such statements seem a little odd. READ MORE >

Intel Talks Up Larrabee X64-Based Graphics Engine
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Chip maker Intel, seeking to rub salt into the wounds of rival Advanced Micro Devices and its ATI graphics chip subsidiary and to get the X64 architecture chasing some pretty high-end visualization workloads in supercomputers and perhaps in game consoles if IBM is not careful, is this week providing some insight into the forthcoming 'Larrabee' family of X64-based graphics engines. READ MORE >

IBM's Q2 Server Sales: Let's Do Some Math
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

I have never understood why IT suppliers do not just come out and report their sales by product categories, but I suspect that we can blame the accountants and chief financial officers at those suppliers and the nervousness of the marketeers, who want to say as little as possible about how well or poorly they are doing in any product category. Anyway, because IT vendors only talk broadly and vaguely about their sales, IT consultants, Wall Street analysts, and wiseguy journalists are left each quarter to take a stab at trying to figure out actual sales for products. READ MORE >

As I See It: Babes in Broadband
by Victor Rozek

A couple of years back, my wife got frustrated with our glacially slow Internet connection and called Qwest, our telephone service provider, to see if anything could be done--preferably before the next millennium. After spending the obligatory eon in automated phone-support hell, then being shuffled to an assortment of earnest but useless people, she was finally dumped on the marketing department. READ MORE >