James Murdoch quits NewsCorp

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-53617966

Galileo Replacement

UK considering investing in defunct OneWeb as a way of getting a GPS capabilitity.  How could this possibly go wrong?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-53192842

The quandry of philanthropy

The Besoz philanthropy plans, maybe better spent on conditions and wages at Amazon fulfillment centres?:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45520594

The lost decade

Great article on the banking crisis, and how the wider population has paid for the recklessness of an under regulated industry

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/The_lost_decade

Cisco sell off beleagured SPVSS (aka NDS)

Finally it's happened Cisco's 4 years of mismanagement of the SPVSS business unit is at an end.

Permira are buying it back at a knock down price.

Here's the sanitized press release

https://investor.cisco.com/investor-relations/news-and-events/news/news-details/2018/Permira-Funds-to-Acquire-Ciscos-Service-Provider-Video-Software-Solutions-Business/default.aspx

And from one of the people who mis-managed and rode on the back of it:

https://blogs.cisco.com/news/service-provider-news

All sounds like a great plan that they always intended - but in reality a disastourous acquisition that destroyed the existing business...

Cisco campus 2015

An article from 2015, but a little tour of the Cisco campus.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/secret-places-at-ciscos-headquarters-2015-10

It looks glorious, but it's a dystopia - there is a large gap between how things are and how things are portrayed.

It does feel like a lot of money wasted, a "300 strong" disaster relief team doing work for free, feels like excessive advertising - more good could be done by donating money when disaster strikes!

Cisco looking for buyer for NDS

After 5 years of bad management and massive reductions in work force, they probably will not get $5Bn for it

https://www.bloomberg.com/technology

And breaking on rumour site:

https://www.thelayoff.com/t/Q1IZko3

IoT security risk - who'd have thought it!

I think to anyone in the industry the mad rush to produce pointlessly internet connectivity from everything from light bulbs to fridges while not thinking too hard on the security aspects was always going to become an eventual disaster.

The main problem is the no sense of obligation on the part of the manufacturer to keep devices up to date even if they have done a good job on security in the first place.  You can understand their reluctance, there is no direct money in it - just a small amount of consumer appreciation.   The average consumer will also not really understand the hacking war that is going on around such devices especially if any covert surveillance could be obtained (thinking of the security agencies hacking TV camera functions here).

Also trivial device like a light bulb being connected to the outside world has a short lived wow factor, now a trashy app can turn on your lights when you are out - it's simply not that useful. A read a hilarious article about the Zuckerberg toying with automation at home, and controlling things from his mobile - I hope that keeps him from world domination.

IBM to hire veterans

At first I thought a change of policy, re-employing a tiny percentage of their own veterans that they have fired over the years while moving to cheaper overseas employees with less rights - or "global talent" as IBM would have it.  But no, military veterans to be trained in use of IBM services and software:

https://www.axios.com/ibm-2000-jobs-exclusive-2317626492.html

So cynically this gets IBM back in the governments eyes, and puts them in line for government contracts.  While that's not bad, it is when IBM has done so much to reduce it's headcount in expensive countries.

Cisco

I sometimes look at what is happening at the beleagured Cisco systems on thelayoff.com

Here was a great comment that I think sums up the fake image the corporation endlessly tries to promote - but anyone who has worked there for a while would recognise as false: 

"The old Cisco is gone. Sorry to break the news to you.

Take a look at the images and stories on the CEC home page and on Glassdoor and have that paint a picture for you. The marketing tells the story, in every human-interest story and in every picture:

• A gaggle of smiling 20 something's in t-shirts doing a group limbo or a massive selfie at work
  
• All of them a mix of multi racial, good looking kids with an equal number of men and women
  
• Random story about how some salesguy saved up all his PTO so he could climb some peak in Nepal and put a Cisco flag on it
  
• A catchy story about how we are going to be the TESLA of IoT, Smart Cities, (insert shiny object here) and rule the world
  

It is all rather transparent, somewhat desperate and sad. Maybe I'm just bitter about where we are now and I'm seeing stuff that doesn't exist. Maybe not."

Cisco give up on public cloud

Looks like Cisco are abandoning the idea of a public cloud offering.   I am not surprised they started late, lacked conviction and never looked like they were going to step up to the big players in this market:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/13/cisco_to_kill_its_intercloud_public_cloud_on_march_31st_2017/

Anatomy of a US corporate: Cisco to outsource NDS

Only rumours but one I keep hearing, Cisco will outsource the european side of NDS - essentially running down the SPVSS business unit they spent so much money acquiring.

It has not happened yet but if it does it would be the admission that this was an example of buying something they had no idea of how to run.

A lot of the "leaders" bought in to run SPVSS were either quietly fired "looking for other opportunities" in Cisco speak.  Or ran back to the US when they realised the company was never going to make the acquisition work.

Watch this space.  I still think the smart money would be to sell it on to someone who cares (e.g Sky), rather than to some bottom line maintaining out source cowboys.

Interesting article on Facebook reaction to Google Plus

Good insider view on how Facebook and narcissist Zuckerberg reacated to Google Plus.  Really shows the deluded self centred nature of Silicon Valley:

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/how-mark-zuckerberg-led-facebooks-war-to-crush-google-plus

Great place to work - really?

If you did not already know the 2016 "best workplaces" in the United Kingdom has been announced.

http://www.greatplacetowork.co.uk/best-workplaces/best-workplaces-in-the-uk-large-category

In second place are McDonalds which may have some good ethics internally but is a blight on society by pushing unhealthy eating and leaving wider society with the bill.

Also high at fourth place is Cisco, claiming around 3200 people in the UK.  Most of these will be from the disastrous take over of NDS.  Most of those people are made to feel like the US corporate has a gun to their head - the minute results are bad they start firing.

I wonder how much employees are coerced into providing good feedback, I remember one time at Cisco the UK director leaving a global voice mail on everyone's phone "reminding" them of what a great culture Cisco was.

Nothing could be further from the truth!  Narcissistic self-obsessed management, too much internal infighting meant that the company was slowly dying and surviving off buying out competition that looked a threat and then proceeding to run that down!

Anatomy of a US corporate: Acquisition Failure

The first question that entered my mind when Cisco bought NDS for $6bn was Why?

It certainly seemed like a shrewd move by Permira, who had being spinning a refloat rumour for a while.  But what better way to sell off the company than to another company with a lot of cash sitting overseas.  Looking back now it feels a lot like Permira saw Cisco coming.

What did Cisco think they were buying?  To me NDS was a company entirely based around the production of smart cards for digital broadcasters.   A lot of ancillary services existed for other areas of digital broadcasting - but NDS never really made big on this, it was all about enabling the per subscriber sales of smart cards.

That is not to say NDS was not looking at the future and the threat of over the top services taking over in the broadcast world.  They had some niche technologies for OTT playback increasingly in a cloud context, but again nothing big and never going to be what the company was going to make money out of.   They knew they had to adapt to stay relevant to the broadcasters, but were slow in doing so - just because you are too busy keeping what you have now working.

I think Cisco saw the OTT/cloud part of the business as bigger than it really was, and much of their valuation was in thinking it was all ready to deploy when in actual fact it was years away (by which time a more nimble competitor would have done it).

Cisco saw the opportunity to build another service provider business unit this time for video.  The belief being that the reliance on services now turning back to the service provider infrastructure, hardware sales would follow.  But really they ended up taking on a mid size company that was beginning to struggle to stay relevant, and inherited all of its problems rather than the expected cash cow that could serve the corporate giant with easy revenue.

Ridiculous interview on leadership

From Harriet Green on Radio 5 Wake up to money this morning. She finds herself at IBM heading up an Internet of Things/Education VP role.

She kept mentioning "Cognitive" and "IoT" like they were uptopias. Never mind the massive security risks on IoT, never mind the social upheaval on massive soulless automation by big business.

The interviewer who is usually good at separating their agenda from the real world issues failed this time. No mention of what a terrible cost cutting, profits and maintaining share price at all costs company IBM has become.

It is also killing itself slowly while maintaining excessive executive pay levels who under perform. That is a better reflection on the modern IBM that the interviewer should have already been aware.

Her obsession was also "leadership", endless leadership - what this leads to is a narcissistic management culture that competes and fights amongst itself continually, we certainly do not need more of that.

Anatomy of a US corporate: Cisco

A feature of big US companies is the off shoring of large amounts of profit that they do not want to bring back to the US and face taxation on. Although never explicitly stated companies like the networking behemoth are continually acquiring companies in Europe as they seek to do something useful with the money. The intent is usually to take out a competitor, move into new market segments, and initially believing they can integrate the offering into Cisco's product line up.

Cisco are by no means the only company doing this, they have arguably being more successful than others but have had some spectacular failures in big acquisitions in recent years. Having being in one such take over I'll do a few blog posts analysing what happened and why they failed. One thing Cisco were not short of was confidence in their ability to integrate new business units, to the point of making you believe it was a well oiled machine. The truth is really a company that only runs on it's margins and numbers, completely over obsessed with how much profit can be extracted from the newly acquired entity.

Typical Cisco acquisition fail

Good article on a $415M acquisition failure of Whiptail storage arrays.  Has all the hallmarks of a typical acquisition by them, failure to integrate, management infighting, founders and key employees leave, and the investment gets written off:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/24/whipped_tails_acquisition_angst_and_attrition

Cisco CEO articles

Some good articles on the new Cisco CEO - and a sharp analysis of IoT and the obsession with doing things faster for no obvious benefit.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/06/cisco_robbins_keynote/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/11/pitchforks_torches_and_awful_quotes/

BBC fires 1000 people

Interesting article on the BBC seeing a shortfall of licence payers because of the availability of iPlayer and other online media.

Failure to move with the times, the charter renewal will surely have to cover how they are funded or what they can make money on.

http://arstechnica.co.uk/business/2015/07/bbc-axes-1000-jobs-due-to-growing-popularity-of-online-video-streaming/