A lot of people are calling the Cloud Czars greedy these days. They’re nickel and diming their customers, charging for things they never charged for before. They’re laying people off and deprecating services people have come to depend on. But it’s not really greed. It’s panic. Having spent 10s of billions building today’s cloud infrastructure, […]

One of the big themes of 2024 so far is that Joe Biden is old. He’s as old as Paul McCartney. As old as Barack Obama’s late mother. He’s older than any Baby Boomer. He first ran for public office in 1970. He served in the Senate with men born in the 19th century. That’s […]

Jon Stewart returned to The Daily Show and was promptly eviscerated by Democrats for stating that Joe Biden is old. This just in. Joe Biden is old. But that’s his superpower. If he’s re-elected and serves out his term, Biden will retire at 86. That’s the same age Konrad Adenauer was a half-century ago when […]

Most sectors of the economy, and most of the stock market, are going nowhere now. The best companies are growing, and their earnings are rising. But that’s because of efficiency, cutting costs and (especially) cutting people. Even the Cloud Czars are cutting back, and those on the Left don’t like it. By reducing headcount (on […]

If you’re not into the Super Bowl, this weekend is book reading time. The most thought-provoking book you can read this weekend is Harry Turtledove’s The Wages of Sin.  Turtledove got his moniker as “the master of alternate history” with hinge point stories. Two examples are Lee magically getting AK-47s in 1864 or winning the […]

Before the Tech Era really began, around 2008, I had a lot of respect for billionaires. They earned their money. Sam Walton (right) and Bill Gates worked decades building great businesses, which brought great benefits to the American people. They understood that they weren’t doing the work alone. There were thousands of people working with […]

The best prism through which to see current events is something I’ve been writing about here for over 15 years. It’s The War Against Oil.  The sub-title of this blog when I started put it simply. “The Sun shines. The wind blows. The tides roll. We live on a molten rock. There is no energy […]

It’s not the “Magnificent 7.” It never was. This era is defined by the companies I called “Cloud Czars” in the last decade. Apple. Microsoft. Amazon. Google. Meta. They invested the $1 billion/quarter needed for the Cloud game when bigger companies stood on the sidelines and watched. Those companies are now in (relative) ruins because […]

It’s becoming clear to me that 2024 will be a global hinge point. That’s not based on, but on technologies I’ve been studying for 15 years. The Machine Internet Open source built the Cloud, and the Cloud is building the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. It’s AI that will build the Machine Internet. AI is scaling […]

I am in my 46th year as a business reporter. The same issue that troubled me at the Houston Business Journal in 1978 troubles me today. That is, we believe anything sources tell us. Accordingly we follow the Golden Rule, the one that reads “He who has the gold makes the rules.” That’s why social […]