Weekly recap

Weekly Tech Recap - № 366 - Hard drive sales, Apple Lisa, the technologies of 2023, Azure OpenAI

By Laurent Gloaguen,

January 20, 2023.

Time for hard drives to hit the road?

Hard drive sales have crashed, as evidenced by a 40% drop in 2022. The three industry leaders saw similar drops last year, with a 43.7% shipment decrease for biggest producer Seagate, 40% for Western Digital Technologies and 39.3% for Toshiba. There are several reasons for these soft results. Some are due to market trends, such as inventory correction, a cooling economy, companies’ weaker demand for cloud storage, etc. But another disruptor poses a lasting threat to the HD industry: increasing competition from SSDs, which are growing more affordable. For example, hard drives and half-terabyte SSDs are now reaching price parity. And if you buy a new laptop, there's a 9 in 10 chance it will have an internal SSD. The consumer market is hanging on thanks to external HDs, usually purchased for back-ups. But for how much longer, if the price of high-capacity SSDs keeps dropping?

⇨ Tom’s Hardware, Mark Tyson, “HDD Shipments Almost Halved in 2022.”

2023-01-16

Apple’s Lisa is 40!

Apple Lisa ad, 1983. © Apple.

On January 19, 1983, Apple, then led by John Sculley, released the Lisa, its new GUI (graphical user interface) computer operable with a mouse. The concept was revolutionary at a time when all operating systems, such as CP/M and MS/DOS, relied on lines of commands. In 1979, Steve Jobs was invited to Xerox’s PARC research center to have a look at Alto, a GUI prototype. Apple’s cofounder immediately saw the potential of this new way of interacting with a computer, and couldn’t understand why Xerox was hesitant to push the technology further. He got started on a project to design a similar computer for business use, built upon the powerful Motorola 68000. Lisa featured many technological innovations, but its initial price of 9,995 USD (about 30,000 in today’s dollars), combined with companies’ reluctance to think outside the box, made this computer a commercial failure. But it wasn’t a total loss. Jobs, squeezed out of the Lisa team in 1981, salvaged many of Lisa’s features and included them in the Macintosh project. LisaGraf graphics routines, for example, were renamed QuickDraw and easily carried over to the Mac, which was also equipped with a 68000 processor. While Lisa didn’t meet with the hoped-for success, all computers owe her a debt of gratitude: Apple invented the menu bar with drop-down menus, double-clicking and even copy-paste, which the Lisa first implemented. In recognition of this ground-breaking computer that made IT history, Apple has authorized the Computer History Museum to release the Lisa source code.

⇨ Ars Technica, Tom Warren, “Revisiting Apple’s ill-fated Lisa computer, 40 years on.”

⇨ IEEE Spectrum, Hansen Hsu, “The Lisa was Apple’s best failure.”

2023-01-19

Five technologies to look out for in 2023

Impact of Tech in 2023. © IEEE.

A recent survey shows that the five areas of computing technology predicted to have the most impact in 2023 are cloud computing, 5G, the metaverse, electric vehicles, and the industrial Internet of Things. The forecast is based on responses from 350 business leaders, chief technology officers, IT directors, and other tech leaders in Brazil, China, India, the UK and the US. The metaverse’s entrance on the scene is a little surprising, but leaders say they are giving some thought to its use in their operations. Ninety-one percent say they plan to use this technology for company training sessions, conferences, and hybrid meetings. According to them, ubiquitous connectivity, 5G, VR headsets, and AR glasses will play an important role in propelling the development of the metaverse.

⇨ IEEE Spectrum, Kathy Pretz, “5G and Metaverse are Crucial Technologies for 2023.”

2023-01-19

Microsoft trims the sails

Microsoft confirmed it will lay off about 10,000 employees, or around 4.5% of its global workforce, by the end of Q3 of its 2023 fiscal year. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Microsoft writes that this measure comes as a “response to macroeconomic conditions and changing customer priorities.” The staff cuts will affect a number of engineering divisions, including the mixed reality department working on Microsoft’s HoloLens gear. This decision corrects a course marked by years of expansion fueled by the effects of the pandemic, among other things. Microsoft's workforce has grown from 135,000 in 2019 to 150,000 in 2020, 166,000 in 2021 and 190,000 in 2022. “During the pandemic, there was rapid acceleration. I think we’re going to go through a phase today where there is some amount of normalization in demand,” said CEO Satya Nadella in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. This is the third round of layoffs at Microsoft since July 2022, which affected several departments including customer and partner solutions and consulting. This decision is the result of an overall slowdown in the IT industry, where Amazon has let go of approximately 18,000 employees, Facebook/Meta 11,000 employees, Salesforce 7,000 employees, and HP 6,000 employees.

⇨ Ars Technica, Scharon Harding, “Microsoft to lay off 10,000 workers, blames decelerated customer spending.”

2023-01-18

New Azure OpenAI service

Azure+OpenAI.

This week, Microsoft is launching Azure OpenAI, a service that makes it easy to integrate OpenAI artificial intelligence models into cloud applications. Microsoft has been testing this service for just over a year, and it will soon add access to ChatGPT, the conversational AI that’s made headlines these past months. The service offers AI models made by OpenAI, including GPT-3.5, Codex and DALL-E, which companies and developers can use in their own applications. As a matter of fact, Microsoft uses its own Azure OpenAI service to power GitHub Copilot, a 10 USD-per-month service that suggests lines of code to developers in their integrated development environment (IDE). In addition, Power BI uses GPT-3 natural language models to generate formulas and expressions, while the new Microsoft Designer application uses DALL-E 2 to create art from text prompts. Microsoft purchased an exclusive license to the technology underlying GPT-3 in 2020 after investing $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019.

⇨ YouTube, “Use Natural Language & Prompts with AI Models | Azure OpenAI Service”

⇨ The Verge, Tom Warren, “Microsoft launches Azure OpenAI service with ChatGPT coming soon.”

2023-01-17