General Electric pours $105 MEEELION into Pivotal Initiative General Electric is pouring $105m into Pivotal, a skunkworks cloud and big data company spun-out of VMware and EMC. The investment was announced on Wednesday, several hours before Pivotal held its coming out party first major press conference. "It's no secret that the cloud and big data are driving dramatic business …
Hard to know where this will end up. If history is any guide, they'll blow it.
GE was doing intercontinental networking in 1969.
GE has the first block of IP address space 3.xx.xx.xx (0, 1 and 2 have special purposes).
But shortsighted management frittered it all away during the 80's.
Quite sad, actually.
I'm very happily using my 3.xx.xx.xx address. It was not frittered away in the 80's.
A lot of the Big Data, Industrial Internet, Internet of Things is a bit of spin on old ideas. But GE has the clout to make it visible to the masses, even if it is a bit of a "NASA drawing on Mars" (cockup in the end!)
My only worry is what the Bean Counters make of it at the end of the next quarter - they can't see past immediate return.
"It's no secret that the cloud and big data are driving dramatic business transformation," Bill Ruh, leader of GE's global software center, said in a canned statement. "They are enabling the Industrial Internet."
Well, giving billions to millions with the common good sense to spend it uncommonly wisely, is a Great Start in All SMARTR Greater IntelAIgent Games Plays which Returns All to the Beginning of Life in LOVEnvironments .
Pick the right one in millions and billions and trillions are assured. Choosing to follow unsound and incomplete ideas can be catastrophically expensive and are easily threaded into narratives and Special Instruction Sets is a sound enough hare-brained idea for Spooky HQ Everywhere to prepare for and expect in the flash of an instance , with future revealed paths to nurture and seed/tend for growth in Fields of Contentment and Spheres of Awesome Control Energy being the Private Pirate Proprietary Intellectual Property of Virtual Interests of virtual interest to Spooky HQ Everywhere.
Trick or Treat, and remember, wrong choices are mistakes and can be devastatingly costly and expensive too.
This is all tied into what GE sees as the growth of the "Industrial Internet", which is a bit of a nebulous term. One way of looking at it is that as sensors etc get more powerful as a natural result of Moores law, there abilities grow and the amount of data generated from increases as well.
The idea is that the data can be captured and analysed and services built on the data, which are then fed back to the customer. In many ways this is akin to what google does with search data, although in this case the primary source is from machines.
This is already done with things like Jet Engines and GE sees the whole industrial landscape as ripe for this sort of innovation.
Whether they will succeed of not of course is uncertain, but I like big ideas, and this is definitely one of the biggest
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