Also on Portfolio
The HP Way: A Big Deal
Turning a Radio Deal Back On
The Dirtiest Major League Ballparks
Five years ago, if Hewlett-Packard bought EDS, everyone would've thought it was pretty much like when IBM bought PwC -- a play to create a powerful data processing consulting business that could coexist with a computer hardware business. In fact, that's been a great model for IBM.
But with HP today buying EDS for $12 billion, the smart thinking goes in a different direction. It's looking like a red-hot area going forward for IBM, Amazon and Google will be so-called cloud computing -- a.k.a. hardware as a service.
If you're a startup or a corporate IT manager, you increasingly won't have to buy computers to run your business. You just rent capabilities from some computing giant and move the information there and back over the internet. If something crashes, the data is always backed up and stored somewhere out there in the cloud. This is the ubiquitous computing idea IBM has pushed for a decade -- making computer power something like electric power.
If you tack together some of HP's other purchases under CEO Mark Hurd -- as Om Malik did -- it seems even more obvious that HP is at least as interested in cloud computing as consulting. And EDS is a solid cloud-computing play because a core business is owning and running giant data centers.
As part of the interview I did with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (the video is now on Portfolio.com), we discussed Amazon's push into cloud computing.
"We've been working on our Infrastructure Web Services for four years," Bezos said. "We launched our first one two years ago, the Simple Storage Service, and I am astonished -- I rarely meet a startup company these days who isn't using our web services and now we're starting to get, you know, deployment inside Enterprise level data centers as well. So it's a very exciting."
Asked about Google's plans to get into a similar business, Bezos said: "Well ... we really do have a practice of not talking about other companies. But this, like our retail business, (there) is not going to be one winner. I think there are going to be multiple winners pursuing different flavors or strategies, different kinds of products.... I think our web services business is going to be part of what becomes an important industry. And ... important industries are rarely made by single companies."
So maybe there is room for HP, Amazon, IBM, Google and others to play in the cloud computing space. The HP deal is telling us that the concept is ready for prime time.
1637: Perhaps weary of watching dinner guests picking their teeth with the points of their daggers, Cardinal Richelieu orders the blades of his dinnerware to be ground down and rounded off. Et voilà, the modern dinner knife is born.
Prior to Richelieu's flash of inspiration (or simple revulsion at bad manners), diners typically used hunting daggers to spear their morsels, which were then conveyed to the mouth by hand or with the help of a spoon. The fork, the implement that really revolutionized chowing down, had existed since biblical times. Despite its utility, however, the fork remained a relative rarity in the West until the 17th century, even among the French royals that Richelieu served with unswerving devotion.
Richelieu's knives became the rage among the court and soon everyone who was anyone in France had a set. The dinner knife became commonplace throughout France after Louis XIV -- who, like most kings, had his own reasons for not wanting sharp blades and pointed tips around -- decreed its universality. Soon afterward, the dinner knife found its way throughout continental Europe to England and, eventually, the American colonies.
It's fitting that the table knife helped refine table manners at the French court. If the French didn't invent good manners (and they didn't: the ancient Egyptians instituted a code of behavior during the Fifth Dynasty), they at least gave the world étiquette, the five-franc word that's synonymous with refined behavior.
Cardinal Richelieu, of course, was more than a simple cutler. As Louis XIII's chief minister, he was no stranger to using sharp implements to influence geopolitical events.
His policies transformed France into a powerful state, bringing it into direct conflict with the House of Hapsburg and the Holy Roman emperors. Allying Catholic France with the Protestant Swedes in the Thirty Years' War, Richelieu looked on as sword-wielding mercenaries laid waste the tiny neighboring German states, helping fuel the grudges that set the stage for modern European history.
(Source: Various)