Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a former IBM executive, writes about technology, the economy, AI, and public policy.
HN commenters cite it for data on corporate creative destruction and IBM's Linux bet, without giving an opinion of the blog itself.
At the time of the SCO lawsuit, IBM had already made a huge bet on Linux. [1] Basically, that's why SCO sued them. And they had their own Unix (AIX) which they could have ported to x86 if they had wanted to--but they didn't.
Here's what the person who headed IBM's Linux initiative told me a couple of years back:
And I still remember very well in December of ‘99, I called Sam Palmisano, the head of IBM Systems Group. And I said, Sam, the task force recommends that we should embrace Linux. And Sam said, okay, Irving, we will do that. But you have to now come over and run an IBM Linux initiative. And I said to Sam, okay, we were pretty much done with our internet strategy. So I was no longer needed to run the Internet division And I said to Sam, when do you want to announce it? And Sam said, how about now? And I said Sam. It's the Christmas holidays. Maybe we should wait until the new year. And in the second week of January of 2000, we made a major announcement saying that IBM would embrace Linux across all of these offerings. And in fact, later that month in January of 2000, I gave a keynote at LinuxWorld, which was taking place in the Javits Center in New York City, about IBM’s Linux initiative.
[1] https://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2006/01/ibms_linux_init.html
> But anyway, it already costs half compared to last year
You could not have bought Claude Opus 4.5 at any price one year ago I'm quite certain. The things that were available cost half of what they did then, and there are new things available. These are both true.
I'm agreeing with you, to be clear.
There are two pieces I expect to continue: inference for existing models will continue to get cheaper. Models will continue to get better.
Three things, actually.
The "hitting a wall" / "plateau" people will continue to be loud and wrong. Just as they have been since 2018[0].
[0]: https://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2018/09/a-critical-appraisal-of-deep-learning.html
4.4% turn over per year, 22% in 5 years
https://www.exchangecapital.com/blog/why-the-sp-500-isnt-what-you-think-it-is#:~:text=Change%20Is%20Constant
and accelerating
https://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2020/01/the-pace-of-creative-destruction-is-accelerating.html