The future for Starbucks! Flash drives and VMware Thinstall

Starbucks future looks precarious, but there is hope with the marriage of sexy flash storage and virtualisation!

Yesterday I blabbed about the life-changing news from EMC, who are using flash drives as part of their data storage solutions. Speed is the theme, and they also boast low energy costs compared to traditional hard drives.

Just like a coffee machine needs beans, so hardware needs software. As you may know, EMC own a company called VMware who are the world leaders in virtualisation software. This means it is possible to store loads of data in such a way that it doesnt really exist until you need it.

Taking it a stage further, it just so happens that today, VMware announced the purchase of Thinstall. These guys can now centrally install one copy of a software program and make it accessible to a whole building full of brain dead office workers – simultaneously. That’s right. Many people sharing the same single program. Cheap, fast and easy to control. Big brother is here!

So, EMC and VMware’s flash-based hard drives combined with virtualisation software give us a glimpse at a killer tech combo that will be all the rage in the commercial world soon.

And this, I hypothesise, is the future for Starbucks !

The ailing coffeee houses should each install a flash server loaded with this virtual software from Thinstall. Thereafter, anyone with a laptop can walk in and drink coffee and log in to th eworld’s greatest software while downloading itunes etc etc.

Admittedly that will cut out the need for workers to go the office buildings that have been tricked out with VMware /Thinstall / flash servers, and this service should clog up Starbucks queues good and proper, but you get the idea of the potential for getting even more bums on seats for longer. And imagine, art students wont need to pirate Photoshop, and architects and engineers wont need to rip off Auto-Cad. The world will be a more moral place, thanks to Starbucks.

At the moment the technology is nearly as expensive as a Starbucks double whatever it is mocha, but unless they push past a basic wi-fi coffee shop experience, Starbucks will have no future.

If you want to know anything else ahead of time, just ask.
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Sinking Samsung Net Profit

Yesterday’s post was about a minor flash drive success story for market leaders, EMC. Today’s entry will highlight why execs at another superstar performer, Samsung, are reaching for their liquor bottles for different reasons.

Profits for the world’s number 2 phone producer, LCD screen manufacturer and biggest chip maker, yeah that’s right, quite a record, have dropped 6.6 percent year on year.

Imagine that, the Korean conglomerate failed miserably and only made $2.1bn PROFIT. I say off with their dumb heads. The management, however, are celebrating the fact that investors are even dumber than them. The share price rose, because, get this, investors view this is the best of the last 5 declining quarters. Go work that out. Samsung executives screwed up less badly than they did over the last 15 months, so their company ends up being worth 2.5% more, in 24 hours.

The moral seems to be, in the corporate world, you get ahead by screwing up. Therefore, I can’t wait for armaggedon / Samsung style earnings results from some of these screwed-up financial companies. The failures are bound to catapault plunging share prices of such stellar tech companies as EMC to new highs on Wall St – it’s obvious! Cheers.

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Flash drives, ah haaah, from EMC

The naked tech truth about hard drives is that flash storage is pretty cool. You can jump all over an iPod and, thanks to the flash drive, it won’t miss a music beat; you can throw your camera out an aeroplane and the flash card will survive unscathed, assuming it doesn’t land in a fire. And as time moves on, the itty bitty 128MB drives have evolved into the gigabytes.

And now, EMC, the masters of the data storage universe, where they think in terabytes and beyond, are the first to incorporate solid state flash drives for industry. Woah, it finds info so fast on your hard drive that it shows the results before you even finish your search term!

I wondered what it would be like to pack one of those flash drive babies into your iPod. Talk about putting a big bulge in your pocket, having to lug one of those around. And a hole in your pocket to buy one.
Of course, EMC couldn’t care less about iPods, they have bigger fish to fry, but on the domestic front, it is a hint of the future of PC hard drives. Amongst other things, instant on computers will be feasible. There we go, another 30 seconds a day saved.

What will you do with your 30 seconds? Listen to a sample of music on iTunes? EMC execs will probably use the extra half minute to compute their extra money.

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Microsoft to buy out Yahoo – Microhoo?

The last post was a quickie about javascript ratings scripts. After reading the rumors at eWeek that Microsoft are considering a buy out of Yahoo, I would have to rate MSFT management a big sub zero.

Microsoft is rapidly losing the search engine battle with Google and despite humungous viral and trojan marketing tactics, organic growth is not going to help them close the gap. Therefore, the only way to pay catch-up is by big check acquisitions. Enter stage left, Yahoo, number 2.0 in the search engine field.

Buying up Yahoo, numero dos in the industry, may sound like a great idea for Microsoft, but they should not go ahead with this crazy merger. The last time I looked at my stats for The Pisstakers (my main site), Yahoo provides at best one quarter the volume of Google search engine traffic. 50% of that 25% is mainly irrelevant and the 25 percentage points are dropping by the week. As my site is obviously a barometer for the whole internet, any merger, (to create Microhoo), would give MSFT an underwhelming, diminishing 30% share of the search engine market, with 10% of that producing crap results.

When you lay it out like that, paying $100bn for such mediocrity sounds like a typical MSFT investment! 100% chance it will probably happen.

If MSFT were wise, for once in their monopolistic lives, they will take the $100bn and invest $1bn in me and give the rest to charity. I will write a killer tech blog, draw a modest $50k weekly wage, and I won’t plaster Google Adsense left and right. Melinda and Bill can use their $99bn to save the world, and we will all say whatever MSFT want us to say, with a clear heart.

I got to writing this post after reading a spoof email from a guy called Andy who claimed to run MSN. He said he was closing MSN down and I needed to tell all my friends! I know, I nearly fell for it, till I realised it was probably from the guy Andy who runs Yahoo.

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