Michael Dell: 64,000 Servers From Number One Position Worldwide And An Official Commitment To OpenStack
Michael Dell said onstage at his Dell World keynote today that Dell is No. 1 in market share for servers in North America and Asia and 64,000 servers from the number one spot worldwide.
Dell did not cite a source for the number one spot claim. There is no public statement about the total. I was told to ask IDC Analyst Matt Eastwood about the numbers. So I did. Eastwood replied to me on Twitter: “Dell’s #2 in server units & #2 in x86 server revenue. They are #3 in server rev overall (pesky mainframes).”
Dell has been steadily gaining in server sales. It was the only server company to see increased share in the third quarter in a market that is showing an overall decline in sales. Eastwood’s remark about mainframes refers to the big bucks that companies like IBM still get for selling its big boxes.
Dell counts market share by shipments, not revenues. In terms of revenues, IBM is in the top spot with $3.5 billion in revenues and HP comes in second with $3.3 billion servers sold. Dell does $2.1 billion in sales.
Servers get packed into racks as dense as hens in a chicken factory. Every few days, a technician walks the aisles, plucking the dead ones that died in the heat of the server room. Servers are a commodity. They’re cheap and provide little margin for Dell and the other vendors.
But Dell did not invite a few thousand people to Austin this week for Dell World just to sell servers. Dell wants to sell solutions. That’s where OpenStack enters the picture. Today, Dell made it official in its support for the DIY open cloud effort. Dell will build its private and public cloud platforms on OpenStack. As a first step, today Dell is releasing a technical preview of its private cloud, Dell Cloud Dedicated, with OpenStack.
So where does this put Dell? Well, it’s not going to copy Amazon Web Services, as it appears HP is trying to do. Instead, look for Dell to dress things up for customers so they don’t have to do it all themselves.
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Twitter should ‘memorialize’ our accounts when we die
For many of us, there’s nothing online that reflects our personality more than our Twitter accounts. The things we do, the links we share, the opinions we hold – they’re all there in 140-character doses for everyone to see. What happens when we die though?
I’ve always had a strange feeling when looking at the Twitter accounts of people who have died. They read like self-penned epitaphs, running commentaries of lives that suddenly, and sometimes unexpectedly, came to an end. Yet they’re fragile memorials, open to hacking or being deleted if someone manages to persuade Twitter to grant them the username after it’s been inactive for a certain amount of time.
This was highlighted recently when social technologist Christian Payne blogged about his experience of receiving a Twitter DM from a friend who died four years ago. Clearly, the account had been hacked and was sending out spam, but it led Payne to call for something I wholeheartedly agree with: protection for the Twitter accounts of those who have died.
The spam DM that Christian Payne received
Meanwhile, the account @martin for a couple of years held the tweets of a sadly deceased user, until someone else took it over last year. I certainly don’t blame the new tenant of the account (I’d considered seeing if I could get hold of it in the past), but what happened to all those tweets that were on the account previously? Are they gone for good, or only accessible to researchers granted access to the Library of Congress’ Twitter archive?
In death as in life
Other social services already have ‘memorialization’ procedures in place. Facebook, for example, allows family members or friends to submit proof of a person’s death to lock the account down into a state that stops it sending out app notifications and other activity that may upset others, but allows people to remember them via their status updates, photos and the like.
Sure, Twitter has never had the same ‘one account per real person’ emphasis that Facebook does, but my Twitter account says more about me than my Facebook account probably does, and I like the idea of it sticking around after I’m gone. I also find it comforting that I could re-read the tweets of loved ones after they die without worrying that one day I’ll load up a profile and find it replaced by someone else’s fresh new account.
Memorializing accounts would be an administrative nightmare for Twitter – after all, how do you prove an account was set up by the person it purports to represent? The currently highly limited Verified Accounts program would probably need to be expanded significantly to make this work. Twitter probably has little interest in becoming a digital graveyard for deceased users, but given how many of us treat our Twitter accounts as an extension of our personalities, it would be an excellent gesture to the user base.
We may not all have the great body of work that famous artists or entrepreneurs leave behind, but it would be nice if our tweets could stay intact when we die – a little bit of us embedded in the world’s collective digital memory forever.
Image credits: Adam Selwood, Christian Payne
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