Trump's CEO councils disbanded

Just yesterday, Trump was talking big about being able replace all of the CEOs who were fleeing his American Manufacturing Council, claiming that he had lots of CEOs that he could call up to replace them. Like so much of what Trump says, however, that was a bald-faced lie, and today he basically admitted as much.

From HuffPost:

The White House’s two advisory councils of top business executives disbanded on Wednesday amid intense public blowback against President Donald Trump’s response to the deadly attack by an accused white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The move came two days after executives began resigning from the dwindling American Manufacturing Council and hours after the billionaire financier who headed the separate Strategic and Policy Forum hosted a call with the 15 members of that panel.

Trump took credit on Twitter for dissolving the councils in order to alleviate pressure on the executives. 

Time will tell if Trump succeeded in "alleviating the pressure" on the likes of Michael Dell; personally, I think that Dell will still burn in hell, having chosen to stand with the neo-Nazi, domestic-terrorism-supporting Trump rather than taking a stand against the resurgence of actual Nazism in the U.S.

Trump and his supporters had a clear and simple choice to make, between the side with the neo-Nazi domestic terrorists on it, and the side with everyone else on it. When it mattered, though, they chose the neo-Nazi domestic terrorists, and nothing they ever do will erase the stain of that choice from their reputations, or from their souls. I'm serious about hoping that a special hell exists, just for them to burn in... and I'm an atheist.

Bringing this back to tech blogging for a second... I urge everyone reading this to boycott Dell Technologies, unless and until the oust Michael Dell as their CEO. Dell stood with the Nazis and the terrorists, and you should refuse to support the company that he leads. Anyone who works at Dell... I'm sorry, but if you're staying on there, then you're standing with Dell and Trump, and I have no sympathy for you at all. This is the moment when you must decide what you stand for, and take a stand, even if it costs you. You cannot opt out of this; to stay silent is to aid the neo-Nazis.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

When the thing that happens is the opposite of what you predict.

Failure is pretty common for people trying to predict the future, but even by the standards of most futurists, this is something of a high water mark (or low point, depending on your perspective) in forecasting for the technology industry.

It was just a week ago that Gartner, Inc., a technology research firm that, among other things, advises companies about the whens and hows of transitioning to new operating systems, was talking about how the PC sales decline was slowing. PC sales, according to Gartner, would only decline by 0.3% in 2017, mainly because everybody was transitioning from Windows 7 and 8.1 to Windows 10. I was, naturally, skeptical, and it looks like I was right about that, because Gartner themselves are now saying that PC shipments are at their lowest levels since 2007.

From CNBC:

Gartner said this week that the PC market declined 4.3 percent during the second quarter. The research company said that shipments were at the "lowest quarter volume since 2007," noting the market dropped for the 11th quarter in a row.

The report is in stark contrast to another from IDC in April which said that the PC market grew for the first time in five years.

Gartner's most recent report isn't just a stark contrast to IDC's April report; it's a stark contrast to their own report of a week ago, which predicted a decline in PC sales for this year of only 0.3%. According to Garner's own numbers, PC sales have already declined by 4.3%, which is 4.0% more than they themselves were forecasting, and the year's only half over. Gee, I wonder if their own vested material interests in seeing big companies upgrading their PCs had any bearing on Gartner's forecasts?

The news is worse for some PC makers, too; Apple's sales are down 9.6% compared to last year, at least if Gartner's most recent figures are to be believed. It should be said that I have serious suspicions about the quality of work that Gartner are doing here, and whether their process is impartial in any sense at all, although Apple was late in refreshing its product lineup, so it's possible that the 9.6% is in the right ballpark. Still, there's no doubt that PC sales are still in a steep decline, and the unicorn of Windows 10's imminent widespread adoption at the enterprise level, which has consistently failed to materialize, with only one PC maker seeing any growth at all.

Of note: Dell seems to be the only company finding growth in the PC business. "Dell achieved five consecutive quarters of year-on-year global shipment growth, as shipments increased 1.4 percent in 2Q17," Gartner said. "Dell has put a high priority on PCs as a strategic business. Among the top three vendors, Dell is the only vendor which can supply the integrated IT needs to businesses under the Dell Technologies umbrella of companies."

So, Dell is doing better than most, although it should be noted that year-over-year growth of only 1.4% is far from fantastic (there's a reason why Dell went private, after all) - Dell's current rate of growth is only noteworthy because it is growth, in an industry that's been declining for years.

This is what the end of Moore's Law looks like. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if you last bought a PC during the Obama administration, and you're still happy with how it's performing, then there's no need to upgrade. Today's newest chipsets are slightly better than those of eight years ago, but the difference is only a slight one; at the height of Moore's Law, the number of transistors on our CPUs would have doubled four times in a decade, but as the rate of PC processing power continues to plateau, there's just no reason to upgrade unless your old PC has packed it in. And people seem to have figured that out, whether they're individual consumers or CIOs.