Good luck with that.

Bullshit. The typical white male on a dating website likes Tom Fucking Clancy because he knows the ladies dig guys who read fatass books.

The ladies on the other hand, can discriminate Tom Fucking Clancy from Toni Fucking Morrison, so they're not impressed, and all the Tom Fucking Clancy lovers stay in web dating purgatory.

Yeah, I think the OP has a little intuition of the relatively common situation where an ailing older technology's flaws are somewhat obvious and well publicized for years and years, but the older technology staggers on far far longer than expected. For both the reason that EUV has been slow to mature, and that 193nm has been surprisingly resilient. It's wrong to conclude that EUV will never be practical, just that one should be very careful about declaring when it is necessary.

A similar situation is going on with the broader issue discussed here-- the eventual replacement of CMOS with some other technology. People are eager to declare the death of CMOS and the need for diamond substrates or nanotubes or whatever, but CMOS will stagger along much longer than the advocates of the new technologies hope because it is easier to extend CMOS than it is to make something truly different more mature and practical.

Yes, but only something like 0.00006% of servers are mainframes.

If you're going to pretend Apples and PCs are interchangeable, you can depend on the fact that the same sort of substitute goods comparison will occur to IBM.

If you're going to discuss consumer electronics manufacturers getting screwed by IDMs and commodity chips, the best example is the first Xbox. Microsoft went with Intel, but Intel's business is offering faster chips for the same price, not the same chip at lower prices every couple years. Some MS ended up with a chip that never got cheap enough. With the second Xbox, Microsoft also designed its own chip (licensed tech from IBM rather than ARM) and they've been shrinking that sucker constantly. Console margins have been increasing constantly.

Apple may hope to have "new" products using the A4 years from now using an A4 that's 1/8th the current cost. That's what owning your own chip allows... not necessarily some awesome roadmap where there's an A8 four years from now, but a roadmap where the phone's using the same processor with very minor redesigns for a fraction of the cost now. It's not that owning the IP allows them to upgrade faster, it's that it allows them to increase margins faster by stringing along the manufacture of the same old chip beyond the point where an IDM would retire it and push something faster and more expensive. Oh, they may call the next thing an A6 or whatever, but the processor performance will eventually be deemed "good enough" and they'll widen their margins on that part and they'll start pushing the other features like much improved battery life.

It's the FTC (Federal Trade Comission) that would review the acquisition, not the SEC. And the European regulators have been more active in the arena. They certainly mulled Oracle buying Sun for an excessively long time, and famously nixed the GE acquisition of Honeywell. I do think even the FTC would not allow the designer of the iPhone to acquire the designer of the processor in many other smartphones.

But that is exactly what Apple did when it acquired P.A. Semi. On a much smaller scale, and with many fewer customers, but it is at least clear what the motivation is.

Sure, buy a company and kill off their highest revenue generating, and highest margin products which coincidentally are chosen more than any other platform to deploy your own database product.

Servers were Sun's highest margin stuff? No wonder they plummeted and got bought. But if Oracle doesn't find value in offering servers bundled with software, one would wonder why IBM does. It's pretty clear that servers are now second fiddle to IBM's software business.

Is it just me or was he explicit about maintaining Sparc, but said nothing about x86 servers? I'll have to find the rest of the interview on Reuters.