This is such a perception skewed by Silicon-Valley-Syndrome.

This is how the rest of the world works -- I run an import/export business and have to manage logistics. It doesn't matter what industry, it could be crude oil or widgets from China at half a penny a piece. It's my job as CIO to choose an implementation.

I'm going to choose SAP or Dynamics (or one of the handful of other ERP's with name recognition) on DB2 or Oracle. I'm going to store my data on EMC dual array filers for HA and pay the tax. Why? Because if I choose node.js and MongoDB to run my 3 warehouses and the system goes down, I'm getting voted out next board meeting. If my SAP R/3 on IBM hardware goes down, they'll do the dance and at least fly some people out to retain their image keeping your job effectively safe.

Banks aren't going to move over from z/OS anytime soon. I don't want my dialysis machine to be running on Riak.

    Or get an EC2 instance and install your own personal copy 
    of Oracle on it.

First thing I thought when reading the headline was 'so is Oracle'. Glad it's mentioned in the article.

AWS is absolutely killing it. Every release cycle, they put out quality products that directly attack Oracle. And, Oracle is in the bad position of having to eat their existing profitable business lines to compete.

Now, of course, cloud isn't here yet. There are certainly lots of issues around security, auditing, privacy, data ownership, etc. But, the trend is accelerating. Why? Because the cloud is so much cheaper. Why maintain and manage your own data center and infrastructure for millions of dollars when you can reliably outsource for a fraction?

I used to do a lot of work in the utility industry. I remember years ago giving a presentation on the cloud. The audience was passionate that it'd never, ever happen to them. They were extremely protective of their data. But, then I slowly saw it happening anyway. It crept in slowly. The first to go were the lowest risk systems. Then, the next lowest risk systems. Then, the next.

The incumbents will hold position for a long time to come, propped up mainly by government spending, hellishly long sales cycles, a corporate aversion to micro products, and FUD. They have plenty of time to catch up. But will they? That's the question. Unless oracle is actively researching new cloud platforms (and I'm guessing they are), they're going to be in pain in 5 years. Corporations that don't move to the cloud will be in a cost disadvantage.

On the other hand, serious work needs to be done to overcome the severe limitations of the current cloud. Lots of certification and auditing and risk assessments and SLAs need to happen.

The magic cloud. Good thing it is made of fairy dust rather than commodity servers and network equipment or Dell and Cisco might be around forever providing those things.

I read somewhere that the cloud is just someone's else computer. At least in the business I am working with that would never be allowed so if there is a cloud to be had it will be on premises, which may keep these so-called walking dead lumbering for quite some time.

I was hoping for an informative well-written article. Alas, I was to be disappointed. Ignoring the juvenile profanity and the condescending rhetoric, the author completely misdiagnoses the technology shift that will be the real game changer ... namely, the advances in memory architecture. Whether it's memristors or Xpoint 3D or some other architecture, data storage will be completely turned on its head over the next 10 years. The lumbering giants (who bring in 4 times more in net profit in a single quarter than Pure Storage garnered in its IPO) will have to be nimble in the future, but I wouldn't call them the 'walking dead' just yet.

They're the walking dead because they pursued scale over innovation. Once they had achieved scale, they found themselves with too much momentum to innovate. So because they couldn't innovate, they built an army of consultants to hawk their wares to customers who also valued scale. But that consulting business never really took off because its existence was predicated on a model of dumping obsolete (but "enterprisey"!) hardware/software onto customers already suffering from vendor lock-in. When those customers start to struggle (as they inevitably will, because the tech industry is far from the only one where scale can impede your ability to innovate) the market has moved on to a different place, and the company never kept up. Then you see a death spiral of layoffs and divestitures that destroys 50-90% of shareholder value.

Sound familiar? This fate awaits all these companies:

- Dell: I don't even know what Dell makes anymore. I guess they sell PCs, servers and consulting services to small businesses that don't know any better. But this market is being eroded by an army of local MSPs and resellers, and it's not a model that benefits from scale.

- HP: HP has been a disaster for a while, but they will probably endure since their hardware is generally pretty good and reasonably priced. But servers and printers are not a very high-margin business, and that's caused their leadership to be constantly on the hunt for a newer, higher-margin revenue stream.

- EMC: Storage is increasingly distributed, and EMC's centralized storage solutions really are a dinosaur in today's market. They just make the wrong product and never found anything to replace it.

- Cisco: By all rights, Cisco shouldn't be on this list given that the Internet still largely runs on their hardware. But they convinced themselves they were a consulting company, and that ran off all their good engineers. Cisco today is a shadow of its former self.

Fucked by Cloud and Fucked by Mobile are also apt terms to describe privacy...

Wtf is this article talking about?

Microsoft fucked because they have Windows on 95% of computers?

Agh, i'm too exasperated to continue my train of thought. Yes, everybody is fucked because of Facebook and Google and MongoDB.

The irony of this is that all of the "cloud providers" still buy gear from traditional IT vendors like Dell, EMC, HP, and Cisco for their own internal corporate IT. It's the dirty little secret that somehow always gets overlooked when everyone is espousing how we no longer need infrastructure when it can all just "Live in the cloud".

The problem of these companies is that they sell highly overpriced hardware that is in the best case sold because the consumer really wants support and risk avoidance, in the middle case because of vendor lock-in and in the worst case because of direct or indirect corruption.

Obviously this is not economically efficient, and thus eventually the scheme has to unravel.

The fact that Cobol is still alive and kicking illustrates that once in place, large systems are hard to replace. Costs and budgets matter too.

EDIT: why did this get downvoted - am I factually incorrect or you simply disagree and want an echo-chamber?

It could take a while yet before all companies big and small start using the cloud to its full potential though ... in my experience people in management are usually against it, citing data security issues.

This is a reasonable forecast, those big-irons will not go away soon, and they will be needed for a long while, it's just the booming age for them are indeed numbered.

While reading this I was thinking, where does Apple fit? Does it have any big plan for enterprise at all?

> They couldn’t use servers from Dell and HP and IBM.

Does Amazon buy servers from Dell, HP or IBM?

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943

"Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality within ten years."

Alex Lewyt, president of Lewyt vacuum company, 1955

"Two years from now, spam will be solved."

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, 2004

Reminds me of when Peter Thiel called them the "Technology Rust Belt" in a talk.

Oracle is not quite as fucked as everyone else on the rest of the list. Oracle has the benefit of offering products that solve very real, very complex business problems: they aren't selling technology infrastructure. Oracle's core products are largely around financial and operational automation, and they are well understood by integrators across many industries. Their biggest threat is something like Salesforce -- but even then, the capital cycle for ERP systems is something stupid like 15-25 years. IBM is largely in the same boat as Oracle, albeit with slightly more government focus.

Oracle is ultimately a software company. Where their customers run that software is largely irrelevant to their core business. Is there margin to make by running an Oracle cloud? Sure, but the bulk of their profits are made just by licensing their LOB software packages and the associated annual support contracts. Oracle will be fine, and Larry Ellison will be able to buy an even bigger yacht in a decade.

Facebook and Google and Amazon do not use Cisco networking equipment, nor do they use Dell servers:

http://www.wired.com/2014/11/facebooks-new-data-center-bad-n...

That's basically the point of the article: These companies that actually had to get up to that kind of massive scale quickly discovered that the way hawked by these big expensive "enterprise" companies didn't work. It was expensive and insufficient. So they've developed their own custom stuff (often built on open source; sometimes open sourced back out) that works a lot better while also being massively cheaper.

AWS isn't just a bunch of Dell servers hooked up to EMC SANs and Cisco switches. The only people who still use that stuff are people who a) have a ton of money and a desire to spend it freely, plus b) don't have really serious demands, which would mandate something better.

That's not a good place to be.

One interesting observation about commodity hardware is it increases in capability faster than the rate of many business demands. In the short term if there's a lack of infrastructure you can grow shipping at a very fast rate, until you catch up...

In the long run the "walking dead" from the article are doomed when due to technological growth an entire data center can be converted to a single rack in a closet without any expensive monthly upstream bandwidth charges and nickel and dimeing from a cloud. Those suppliers have expensive corporate infrastructure that depends on shipping $50M data centers in 2005 not a single $100K rack in 2015, or 2025 or 2035 or whatever, to do the same task. Maybe a great sales campaign can convince them to double their usage, that still leaves them $49.8M in the hole, non-inflation adjusted (ouch).

Computational use for non-computer businesses is kinda like electricity in the VERY long term. If you look at the early years of the growth of electricity vs GDP or whatever, you can rapidly get strange ideas like the average office in 2015 based on projections from 1915 should be radiating heat like the surface of the sun. However, here we are, there is a natural leveling off of how much electricity or municipal water or food a business can usefully consume per unit of GDP. Assuming GDP only goes up, inflation adjusted (LOL). When companies bounce off those limits, life will get very exciting for "eternal Moores Law growth forever" oriented suppliers for those businesses. Based on facebook use stat growth rates in 2007 we should all be spending 78626 hours per day on facebook... didn't happen... building a supplier company based on that assumed growth trend will lead to tears. Moores law says the transistor will shrink not that people will buy it.

Very large hosting/cloud providers will eventually build their own hardware. Even if Dell is involved, it's going to be in a supporting role and won't yield the kind of profits X-many server sales will. And besides, support contracts will also be of lesser value. This and Open Compute is not good for Dell-type of shops. Compound that with Microsoft building PCs in a shrinking PC market, the problems are numerous. Dell can't make a Windows PC better than Microsoft.[1]

All this also because these companies have never really tried to attract the best talent by paying above market compensation. It's fine.

[1] The kind of detachable GPU configuration we saw in Surface Book is harder to pull off outside of MS. Doable, but MS will have the advantage of getting inputs directly from the DX12 team.

All of your examples seem to lack a lot of context. Yes, these companies are all under pressure. But most of them are still in slow growth and working hard at it. There is also quite a bit of innovation in these places. The problem is the market model is changing - that innovation (cloud) undermines everything else.

Their biggest liability is their customer base that IS NOT changing and continues to pay for these products. I see guys everywhere trying to cajole customers down the cloud path because they'd rather be at the seat of that inevitable transition than pushed out. Many customers don't want to. So they're stuck doing the old thing that's dying and the new thing is being done by smaller customers that wouldn't even consider them.

The story of if/how they fail or rise again will be a lot more complicated than you are suggesting. Keep in mind Apple was near bankruptcy 18 years ago.

Example - EMC. I'm not sure what you're talking about, there are a lot of products. Isilon is distributed storage and selling like mad. ScaleIO is free for anyone to use unsupported and a distributed Elastic Block Store. VxRack is scale out compute and storage. XtremIO sells more and is growing at pace with Pure (which just went public). Dell in swallowing them up which seems like the least worst option given Elliott is at their back and HP would be a death sentence. (I don't work at EMC, but a subsidiary and have some knowledge of how they work and sell.)

What would be your opinion on Oracle?

I find it strange that the Author didn't include Oracle in the title although he talks about it at some length in the article body.

There's a lot of stupidity here (or perhaps one might charitably call it excessive glee, or even plain old clickbait), but it's been a long time since 95% of computers ran Windows, if that was ever true in the first place.

You'd have to start by defining "computer". If we use a technically reasonable but broad in journalism's terms definition of "device containing a CPU with integrated MMU", then we're including every mainframe, server, desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet, industrial control system, laser printer or multi-function document management system, router, network or storage switch, storage system controller, sound mixer, and countless other devices. A very small and diminishing fraction of those machines run Windows.

Even if you limited the definition to include only things we traditionally think of as computers, namely mainframes, servers, desktops, and laptops, Microsoft's market share is something like 30%, though it's very difficult to measure and once again subject to definition; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste.... And again, that's been declining for a long time. Even the most generous interpretations that include only desktops and laptops don't get you to 95%; you can narrow-definition your way up to about 90%, and that assumes "market share" includes copies that were made in violation of license and/or law (and thus for which Microsoft received no money).

The reality is that Microsoft is a niche player, not because they lost a market they were previously winning but because that market itself became a small part of something much bigger, in which Microsoft was never especially competitive. As noted by the author, they've been investing heavily in changing that, but the early returns aren't much to talk about. Windows Mobile/Phone is a complete dud, Surface is a weak seller despite recent improvements, and Azure is at best a very distant second in IAAS (see http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/05/28/gartn...). What's remarkable is not that Microsoft is doing so poorly but that they're the only enterprise computing company that even appears to be trying. I think that's what the author was expressing. The characterization as "fucked" comes from Ashlee Vance and should be given the credibility one would assume considering the source. There's little question that most of these companies' positions of relative importance are in decline and have been for a long time. But some, especially Microsoft, still have enormous sums of cash and businesses that are continuing to generate more of it. However irrelevant such a company is, it's still a long way from going out of business. Conversely, no amount of cash is a substitute for organic sales growth.