analysts

Nvidia CEO goes on Intel rant

Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang let rip with a diatribe against Intel at Nvidia's financial analyst day on Thursday. Huang cited frustration with recent Intel comments stating that discrete graphics cards will become "unnecessary."

Because Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, includes integrated-graphics silicon in most of its chipsets the company has become the world's largest supplier of graphics chips. Its upcoming Nehalem processors will move the graphics from the chipset onto the same piece of silicon as the main processor. A design that is expected to result in vastly better performance.

(Note: A contrarian … Read more

Grading the analysts

Sam Lawrence, Jive's chief marketing officer, has issued a report card for two analyst firms with which Jive works. Net net? Forrester is pretty engaged with its clients (and non-clients), and Gartner, apparently, is not.

I've talked about analysts on this blog before, and don't want to spend more cycles denigrating their work. Like Sam, I've found Forrester to be particularly good. Forrester has actively talked with Alfresco despite the fact that we're not clients.

Perhaps Forrester recognizes that there's more to a market than the incumbents (though, as Sam found, no analysts with which we've worked have been all that interested in actually talking to our customers). After all, we're often the ones exerting a big influence but don't want to spend money on buying our way onto an analyst's report. … Read more

Need some data to support your cause? Hire an analyst

CIO.com raises an important issue about the integrity of research being done by industry analysts. Namely, if a sponsor pays for the research, do they get favorable treatment in that research?

But do you ever wonder about the research's integrity? Do you care enough to go to the next page of that document or website and see just who was so interested in this topic or trend that they shelled out big bucks to enable this research project to take place?

The answer is, "No." Most people don't check. They see the headline, look at the pretty charts, and forget about the fine print.

Analysts, to a person, will scream "No!" they're not biased by the money. But it's human nature to be influenced by a paycheck. Very few people/analysts have the clout of Walt Mossberg to be able to nakedly diss a product or company. … Read more

McKinsey's Eight business technology trends to watch

Far be it from me to question the work of McKinsey but their list of Eight business technology trends to watch in 2008 all seem like things we already watch just with different names. Nonetheless, it's a good read as we head into the new year.

Distributing cocreation--sounds like open source development to me Using consumers as innovators--crowdsourcing Tapping into a world of talent--see above Extracting more value from interactions--see above, again I find Number 7-"Putting more science into management" the most interesting The amount of information and a manager's ability to use it have … Read more

AMD turning page, hoping for profit by end of 2008

AMD executives put their best foot forward Thursday during a conference with financial analysts, but only time and a better performance will lift the company out of its 2007 spiral.

The company owned up to its mistakes with Barcelona, its first quad-core server processor, during the conference call. Barcelona will have to be tweaked before it can be sold for general-purpose use, and the revamped chips won't be available until the first quarter of 2008, said Mario Rivas, executive vice president for the computing products group. Systems using Barcelona aren't expected to be available until the second quarter, … Read more

The march of the middlemen

James Robertson over at Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants writes:

The RIAA (and the MPAA, for that matter) are fighting a war they can't win. They are busily irritating their real and potential customers--either suing them, or making life difficult for them--while the real pirates sail along unimpaired. The amount of inertia in that business is astonishing--the good times for all the do-nothing middlemen are over, and it's time for the labels to accept that fact and get on with their lives.

I don't bring this up because I want to replow the well-worked ground of the out-of-touch … Read more

AMD's gift to software developers

On Monday, AMD released a proposal for "Lightweight Profiling" instructions (or LWP; download here), describing a new way for software developers to gather information on software while it runs.

I've only had a few minutes to check out the document, but it looks pretty interesting. Existing performance analysis tools, like Intel's VTune and AMD's CodeAnalyst, generally create significant overhead when gathering performance information. They usually need code that runs in supervisor mode, for example, and they're just for developer use--they aren't meant to be used in production systems.

LWP lets applications gather their … Read more

NPD snaps up Current Analysis' electronics group

NPD and Current Analysis, two of the more well-known analyst firms covering the PC and electronics industry, are teaming up.

NPD has acquired Current Analysis' PC, imaging and consumer electronics businesses, it announced in a press release Thursday. For now, those groups will be called Current Analysis West and maintain their home base in San Diego.

Both firms track the retail electronics industry, providing data on which PCs or flat-screen televisions are selling the most, and why, during critical periods like Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Current Analysis will maintain its own research groups on the East Coast specializing … Read more