Read Like an Analyst: Industry Critiques of VMware, Apple, Amazon and One Hit Wonders

The Read Like an Analyst series gives you a peek into the tech industry moves and countermoves that generated the most conversation around the company’s Keurig these past few weeks.

Startups

The road is long and the winners are few.

• Security and hardware startups are hot ticket but “social startups are dead,” observes Business Insider after listening to 146 startup pitches at demo days for Y Combinator and 500 Startups.
• Check out this infographic on the 44 startups that keep you from using all the built-in iOS apps for mail, calendar, file sharing, photo sharing, etc.
• This TechCrunch post offers an “SaaS Success Database” and analysis. The post covers where the top SaaS startups are located (they aren’t all in the valley) and a list of 1.0b “unicorn” SaaS companies, etc.
• Tomasz Tunguz, a venture capitalist at Redpoint, traces the “go to market” path for vertical SaaS startups- which differs greatly from horizontal SaaS companies.
• Ever wondered how much money startup founders have in their bank accounts? The Hustle has answers.

VMworld 2015 – Reverberations and Repercussions

Will VMware evolve into an organization capable of addressing a fully cloud-enabled world?  Only time will tell.

•  As IT shifts from the data center to the public cloud, how will VMware fare? 10 different analysts and VMware employees weigh in.
• “What I realized this year is that the conference is de facto the yearly re-union of all those having stakes with on premise hardware, either running the machines or trying to coax decision makers out of running these machines,” says Constellation Research Analyst Holger Mueller in sharing his takeaways from VMware VMworld 2015.
• Check out ESG’s video coverage of VMworld 2015.

Industry Critiques

Tech predictions that didn’t pan out, Apple’s dubious iPhone 6s triumphs, why there’s probably something wrong with your OS and, of course, that infamous New York Times piece.

• CIO magazine puts “BYOD – the tech revolution that wasn’t” into context. Key stat: In 2013, 34% of companies were not going with a BYOD approach, this year 54% are not going with a BYOD approach. That’s a steep loss of faith in BYOD.
• Autonomous vehicles and machine learning landed near the top of Gartner’s latest report on the 2015 “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies.” Read more about the trends at “The Peak of Inflated Expectations” here.
• It’s hard to look innovative as an incumbent. Klint Finley of Wired lists “Everything Apple Announced That Someone Else Already Did.”
• Stratechery claims that Apple is making the hardware that Microsoft needs, while Microsoft has the software that Apple needs. And it’s certainly not the first time Microsoft was involved with an Apple product launch.
• Kevin Frei of Facebook goes on a rant about why “Your OS Sucks.”  He gives equal time to Windows, Mac, and Linux.  Well worth a read and a chuckle (or several).
• In the wake of The New York Times exposé of Amazon’s cut-throat culture, Rita J. King and James Jorasch of Science House take an analytical second look at the company’s grueling, competitive ethos.

Containers

Containers can’t be contained….at least not yet.

• App Developer Magazine reports “Kubernetes Based Google Container Engine is Production Ready for Docker.”
• “The benefits of containers are becoming clear, and 2015 is the year to begin sandboxing and understanding where they fit in in any given situation and with an aim to be running containers in production by early 2016, if not earlier,” Jim O’Reilly writes in his piece “Container technology continues to gain ground with VMware.”

One Hit Wonders

Stand out articles – across a range of industry topics.

• Check out this list of the top 25 undergraduate universities for software developers. The rankings are based on the success of recent graduates landing choice software development jobs.
• Though everyone wants to hire tech talent, the talent themselves are zeroing in on San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle and Austin. Why?
• The Center for Global Enterprise used network analysis tools to create elegant visual representations of the API economy. Worth a look.
• Don’t underestimate the value of software development. McKinsey examines the implications of new research on the software development performance of 1,300 companies of varying sizes throughout the world. Findings include, “Top-quartile companies developed software upward of three times more productively than companies in the bottom quartile.”
• Wired reports  “Google Is 2 Billion Lines of Code—And It’s All in One Place.” Cade Metz writes that “… building Google is roughly the equivalent of building the Windows operating system 40 times over.”
• It’s a new development world out there. O’Reilly Radar ponders how the industry will shift to “to create a new development paradigm that exists solely in the cloud.”
• Big data is weighing heavily on executives’ minds. “What’s the Big Data” pulls some interesting highlights from a survey of more than 300 executives of large global companies on big data analytics.
• The data center industry is aiming to be environmentally-friendly and power efficient for good reason.