From Kalamazoo to Silicon Valley and Beyond (K2SV+)

                         Facebook's Amir Michael with a  rack server design in 2012       A s an EE Times reporter back in the 2000’s, I was a hardware guy, so I mainly followed the cloud computing hardware not the algorithms. I was trying to figure out what this sea change in our digital lives would mean for my engineering readers. What sort of systems would people build? What kind of chips would they need? At first, the outlook seemed gloomy. Google was rumored to have designed its own PC server motherboards to run its services. Its data centers were so large -- so the story went – that cutting five cents on the cost and a few watts on the power of each board would amount to millions maybe tens of millions of dollars in savings. But no one knew for sure because the Googles and Amazons kept quiet. They didn’t want anyone else to learn the hard lessons of cloud computing they were figuring out...

     W hile I chronicle d havoc the cloud was wreaking with my readers in computer companies, John D’Ambrosia found himself in the path of the same storm. D’Ambrosia ran groups that wrote th e standards for Ethernet, the leading technology for sending data around on office networks. Herding the cats of tech experts that define such industry standards is a volunteer gig for engineers that maintain a paying job at a company, typically one that has a strategic stake in the standards. In 2009, D’Ambrosia (left) worked for a large company that made connectors, the necessary but low-tech parts that link computers and networks. He sported a thick, close-cropped head of blond hair that ringed a boyish face, and he had a boy’s love for his golden retriever who perpetually slept at his feet, waiting under his desk for the endless telephone conference calls to end. D’Ambrosia was well suited to the role of standards chairman: he was a people person who fed on the energy of ...

      B y the time D’Ambrosia was convening his 400G effort, Google went public with details of the next traffic jam inside its big data centers — complexity. Networking more than a million servers into one warehouse-sized computer required thousands of routers and switches and those systems demanded far too much time from human operators. A group of academics and entrepreneurs gathered at Stanford to find a way forward. One of them, Amin Vahdat, a computer science professor Google hired to sort out its networking issues, became a spokesperson. As the representative of one of the world’s largest buyers of networking gear, Vahdat had clout. He was also a good communicator, explaining complex and often controversial new ideas in a calm, clear way. That came in handy because the cloud giants were essentially upending the technology and business model of big switch and router makers like Cisco. Vahdat is ultra smart, soft spoken and lucky. While still an undergrad ...

     C onsumer electronics was the most exotic and strategic beat at EE Times in the 1990’s, made all the more fascinating because it was covered by our most passionate and nontraditional reporter, Junko Yoshida. It was exotic because its products were all about having fun and its center of gravity was in faraway Japan. The country leveraged the 1947 invention of the transistor and the semiconductor industry that quickly rose around it to pull itself from the wreckage of World War II. Along the way, it wrote the book on how to build small stuff in high volume with top quality, skills at the heart of chip making. In the 1960s, it had its first hit products with some of the early transistor radios. They used thin chips to replace fat vacuum tubes, enabling AM/FM radios that, for the first time, you could slip into a shirt pocket. Pretty cool. Japan Inc. was built on what followed – TVs, cameras, VCRs and the chips and other key components inside them. For example, it ...

     I digress, as most people trying to describe Junko probably do. The point is she’s written a barrel of stories. Her on-going career includes scoops about hot topics like high-profile failures of electric and autonomous cars and China’s first multibillion-dollar government fund to fuel its tech race with the US. In the 1990’s, her best work was focused on consumer electronics. In those days, TV, broadcasting networks and movies were all analog. You couldn’t search or play their content without help from a newspaper and a movie theater. But “the world trend is digital,” according to a speech from a director of Japan’s broadcasting bureau that Junko quoted in a 1994 story. We all knew the digital transition could take decades. It would require inventing new technologies and standards. New hit products would emerge and current favorites would become passe. In such transitions fortunes are made, leading companies fade away and scrappy startups become the new giants. ...

     L ater, Japan Inc. took Sony’s advice and created a software platform it was confident would win the race to mobile computing. The I-mode service was a hit in Japan’s Akihabara electronics shops where scores of Japan-made flip phones (like the one below) used it on their tiny screens. At EE Times , we saw I-mode and the Japan giants behind it as a viable player, one of many contenders – until the Apple iPhone arrived and Japan had again lost the race to a next-big thing. What went wrong? “By 2000, Japan was so confident of itself it thought it would take over the electronics world,” Junko said in a recent phone interview from Paris. “It lost the bigger picture.”  Essentially, Japan Inc. forgot the lesson of its early success – focus on serving big international export markets. Instead, it got distracted by the local tech fashions that sprouted up in its small domestic market, styles that consumers in the rest of the world found uninteresting, even inscr...