Spring cleaning

 In April,  I decided to step down from Red Hat where I had spent about the past 14 years. This will not be retirement but it will be the opportunity to step back into the analyst business and to otherwise pursue projects of my interest and liking. I'll still have a heavy emphasis on open source software, especially at the infrastructure level but I will be following and working on hardware and software innovations more broadly.

Over time, I'll be reflecting on some of the changes and evolution of the IT industry both expected and less so. But that's for another day.

Going forward, this blog will serve as the main site/blog for my technology analysis. My existing Connections blog will serve as an archive for my technology writing, podcasts, and so forth in addition to being where I'll post on non-technology related topics going forward.

My first project that I'm sharing is a short book I've writen, and which soft-launched a while back about the Intel Itanium processor.

It was one of my significant interests throughout my stint as an IT industry analyst during the 2000s, a 64-bit design intended to succeed the ubiquitous 32-bit x86 family. I wrote my first big research report on Itanium and it seemed like something of an inevitability given Intel's dominance at the time.

But there were storm clouds. Intel took an approach to Itanium's design that was not wholly novel but it had never been commercially successful. The dot-com era was also drawing to a close even as Itanium's schedule slipped out. Furthermore, the initial implementation was not ready for primetime for a variety of reasons.

Especially with the benefit of hindsight, there were other problems with the way Intel and its partner, Hewlett-Packard, approached the market with Itanium as well. Itanium would ultimately fail, replaced by a much more straightforward extension to the existing x86 architecture.

This short book draws six lessons from Itanium's demise:

Lesson #1: It’s all about the timing, kid 

Lesson #2: Don’t unnecessarily proliferate risk

Lesson #3: Don’t fight the last war

Lesson #4: The road to hell is paved with critical dependencies

Lesson #5: Your brand may not give you a pass

Lesson #6: Some animals can’t be more equal than others

While Itanium is the study point for this book, many of the lessons are applicable to many other projects. 

You can download your free PDF version today. I'll also be posting chapters here and will make a print-on-demand version available at some point.