Robert X. Cringely

Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

Some major ISPs appear to be attempting to extort money in exchange for peering with Level3

Why Wind Turbines Have Three Blades

What the Heck Is Happening at Apple?

Apple's not in trouble (yet) but here's how Cupertino can get its mojo back

Cringley: Japan may have just permanently lost 20% of its electricity supply

There’s a 40 year-old nuclear reactor cooling-down right now in Japan following the big earthquake in that country. Actually there are 11 such reactors cooling-down, automatically brought offline by the 8.9 temblor, but one of those reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi generating plant is not going gracefully and 3000…

Why Microsoft bought Skype

There is so much to write about but I’ll begin with Microsoft buying Skype for $8.5 billion. The pundits are debating whether this move by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer makes good business sense, but that’s the wrong way to look at it. The better approach is to wonder what would have happened had Microsoft not

Net Neutrality will die, so let’s take the profit out of killing it

Fighting the FCC is futile at this point, but Bob has a way to (in a way) save Net Neutrality

I’m writing again

I'm Writing Again For those of you who are still here — and given how long it's been, "still here" is a real act of patience — thank you. I haven't written a column since 2022. Just like everyone else, I've been busy all this time on Artificial Intelligence, founding with two partners a company

Amazon Is Becoming the New Microsoft

Amazon.com is hugely dominant in cloud computing and behaving like Microsoft did in the 1990s

Cringely predicts the second coming of Java

There’s a continuous revolution taking place in web development as platforms and tools evolved first to handle dynamic pages and now cloud services. But sometimes what goes around comes around so I’m predicting a resurgence of Java and Java-like languages as rotating storage goes into decline. Here’s why. In the…

Steve Jobs

And now the frenzy begins. Running this story in reverse it's suddenly clear why Apple didn't introduce the iPhone 5 this week. It would have been lost in the news of Jobs's death, killing the marketing value he would have loved. I'm sure the phone will appear in a week or two with that appearance

Cringely: Making 400k/yr profit on an eBook about parrots

Let’s face it, the economy is in trouble and so are the rest of us. Based on the dregs I find in my spam filter that makes this a hot season for folks selling plans for how to make big money on the Internet – plans that mostly aren’t worth what people pay for them.

iCloud’s Real Purpose is to Kill Windows

Apple’s announcements yesterday about OS X 10.7 pricing (cheap), upgrading (easy), iOS 5, and iCloud storage, syncing, and media service can all be viewed as increasing ease of use, but from the perspective of Apple CEO Steve Jobs they perform an even more vital function -- killing Microsoft. Here is the money line…

$99 Mineserver: The Devil Is in the Details

An update on my kids' Mineserver project

The Secret of iOS 7

The iPhone 5S, iOS 7, and whatever follows make logical desktop replacements. They, and phones like them, will be the death of the PC.

Autodesk's John Walker Explained HP and IBM in 1991 (2015)

One reader of this column in particular has been urging me to abandon for a moment my obsession with IBM and look, instead, at his employer -- Hewlett Packard. HP, he tells me, suffers from all the same problems as IBM while lacking IBM’s depth and resources. And he’s correct: HP is a shadow of

Don’t mess with IBM

How companies like IBM intimidate employees and discourage them from speaking up.

The Decline and Fall of IBM

Bob's new eBook, The Decline and Fall of IBM, is finally available on Amazon.com.

Plutonium is Forever

I have been doing business in Japan for 20 years, consulting for big and small companies, speaking at conferences, writing for Japanese publications, and helping both American and Japanese companies do business with each other. For years I flew to Tokyo once a month, generally in my role as giver of bad news, which I

Apple knows 5G is about infrastructure, not mobile phones (2018)

5G is overkill for phones but that's okay because for carriers it is really about destroying broadcast and cable TV, ISPs, and telephone companies. One network to rule them all.

Linux 3.3: Finally a little good news for bufferbloat

While I was out chasing computer history last week, the Linux 3.3 kernel was released. And a very interesting release it is, though not for its vaunted re-inclusion of certain Android kernel hacks. I think that modest move is being overblown in the press. No, Linux 3.3 appears to be the first OS to really

The People’s Republic of Google

I was hanging the other day with some ex-Google folks. There are more and more of these as the search company matures and the fact that I’m running across a few is, in itself, meaningless. But without giving away any trade secrets (which the ex-Googlers absolutely refused to do) these chance encounters have opened my

Burn Baby Burn

Note there is additional new material at the end of this column -- Bob I am old -- so old that when I was a college freshman there were dormitories filled with men and others filled with women but no dormitories at all filled with both men and women, at least not where I went

Cringely's subscription-based mortgage refinancing startup