While there was some superlative news on the football front over the weekend (all four NFL games ended as I desired, plus the USC Orange Bowl demolition), other news has been less than overwhelming. This morning, therefore, has not been as cheery as one could hope. Then along comes this article in DP Review [via garret] to give a laugh. One of those small world things.
IBM has been pushing its (reasonably well earned) business expertise in an ad campaign over the past few weeks. Those UBA (Universal Business Adapter) ads and the like. In which their competitors are accused of using magic business beans to give customers the illusion of tech success, but only the illusion (for example, the last line of dialog in one of the current TV ads is along the lines of “You have to put in another quarter.”).
So IBM, looking to focus more closely on service-oriented lines of business, made a deal to sell of most of its disk drive business to Hitachi. That deal just closed and Hitachi announced a cool new product (discussed in that DP Review article), a 4GB version of the MicroDrive. The MicroDrive is about one inch on a side and fits inside Compact Flash Type II slots, useful for very mobile devices like PDAs, digital cameras, and the like. And these drives use Pixie Dust, known technically as antiferromagnetically coupled (AFC) media, which adds a thin layer of ruthenium to the platters inside a drive and allows more data to be packed onto each platter. IBM even got a patent for the pixie dust tech!
So I’m sitting here this morning thinking pixie dust, magic business beans, hey it’s all good. Who cares if you can’t tell the difference between maketing bullshit and marketing bullshit?
BillSaysThis 