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The Reg's review of 2014: Naked JLaw selfies, Uber and monkey madness

Put it on a stick and 'cheesie'

Microsoft, IBM, HP and re-invention

Break glass for emergency CEO strategy

IT giants Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, SAP and IBM made billions of dollars in revenue in 2014. Their biggest headache this year, though, is how to ensure they keep on making billions into the future as growth is coming in new areas – online services and tablets, and outside the traditional PC and server markets.

After a year in the job Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made his big pitch - “cloud first, mobile first.” Apps are now expendable – so Office came to iOS and Android - with the platform now the crown jewels - the platform being Windows and Azure. Using apps and end points Microsoft now hopes to hoover up users’ data. The big plan? Run data through machine learning and do a lot of data science to make money from that data while, also, selling those online services – Azure, Office 365.

As part of the deal, Microsoft open-sourced its core architecture, .NET and made Windows available for free to firms making small PCs and tablets with a screen smaller than nine inches – a revolutionary move for a firm in part built on Windows licence revenue. Elsewhere, Microsoft swallowed Nokia while it racked up losses on its Surface tablet and marched further away from Windows 8, announcing Windows 10 – due in 2015.

Train wreck

How do you get a steam-powered business on a new track?

2014 seemed a long way from the Halcion-days of Linux-driven revenue from IBM.

The year saw IBM rack up 10 quarters of falling revenue, blamed on the storage, services and its server businesses. Servers sales were bad for everybody in 2014, with low-priced Asian suppliers Huawei and Inspur Electronics growing fastest and IBM’s results saw its share price hammered and ignited whispers of an IBM break up with the stock falling to a three-year low by October.

Action was needed. IBM abandoned its five-year plan for nearly half of profits to come from software by 2015 and EPS of $20. It put its Watson super computer to work, as a paid-service. But, in truth, the hard work still lay ahead. In January IBM announced two massive programs to cut costs and grow revenues and profits. Selling its x86 server business to Lenovo for $23bn – the firm that bought IBM’s PC business 14 years earlier. IBM reckoned this would let it focus system and software while Lenovo anticipated growth with “the right strategy and great execution.” In the same month IBM announced a $1.2bn program to build 40 data centers world wide, turning IBM into a provider of online services. With the sale going through and data centers still being built, it’ll be some time before their benefit is seen and it’s unlikely that 2015 will be much better than 2014 for IBM.

Three years into its turn-around plan and HP’s CEO Meg Whitman had nothing more than the odd green shoot to show. She therefore broke the glass on the HP’s CEO’s emergency strategy plan: announcing she will split the company in two – printers and PCs on one side and everything considered “enterprise” on the other. Whitman in February denied there was a plan to split the firm but by October had brushed the dust off the idea of her disgraced predecessor Leo Apotheker from the year before. According to Whitman, the split would give the units the “independence, focus, financial resources, and flexibility they need to adapt to market and customer dynamics, while generating long-term value for shareholders”. A month later, and with anticipation of flat growth in fiscal 2015 and no guidance given for 2015, Whitman told Wall St: “I’ve always said that turnarounds aren’t linear and while we are seeing clear pockets of growth, other areas still need more work.”

Passed away

2014 saw influencers and heroes of tech depart. Tony Benn passed away aged 88: the modernizing Labour MP who forced British computers firms into a marriage called International Computers Limited to take on IBM. ICL attained thestatus of Europe’s fourth largest computer company and was bought by Fujitsu in 1998 before the ICL brand was finally killed in 2001 by its Japanese owner. It was the year that IBM’s former chief exec John Akers also passed away, aged 79. Akers was IBM’s sixth CEO, who rode the success of the S/360 and 370 mainframes but was unseated by the rise of the PC and eventually succeeded by Lou Gerstner.

Anthony Wedgwood Benn MP

Anthony Wedgwood Benn MP: Labor-party fireband and Brit-tech nationalist

From the entertainment world, two quiet heroes of the misfit IT crowd left us. Adrian Mole creator Sue Townsend died aged 68; Mole would have been the first and formative secret hero to many in tech: intellectually gifted but out of place, a silent witness to the madness around him.®

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