Dell. EMC. HP. Cisco. These Tech Giants Are the Walking Dead | WIRED

An accentuate-the-potential-negative take on Dell + EMC:

"Oh, sure, they’ll shuffle along for some time. They’ll sell some stuff. They’ll make some money. They’ll command some headlines. They may even do some new things. But as tech giants, they’re dead.

This was driven home in wonderfully complete fashion this past Wednesday, thanks to a trio of events. If you don’t follow the seemingly uninteresting, enormously lucrative, and, in fact, endlessly fascinating world of enterprise computing—computing that helps run big businesses—you may have missed them all. But they were big news in the enterprise world. And together, they show just how dead those giants really are."

An excerpt from Cringely's perspective, Dell buys EMC and gets the corporate cloud for free:

"It’s as simple as this: if Dell owns VMWare everyone else who makes servers for VMWare will be contributing to Dell’s profits. If Dell chooses to get into the cloud, by owning VMWare they could become a powerhouse in the industry with a price advantage no one else can match. Most of the corporate world is on VMWare and that market needs a VMWare based cloud. It doesn’t exist today because of the software cost of VMWare. Dell could fix that…. but only for themselves.

And EMC is no slouch. They are a big maker of storage and are making inroads against IBM. They have a disk based backup (Data Domain) and IBM doesn’t. They have a great NAS product (Isilon) and IBM ended its partnership with NetApp. EMC will put Dell in many new corporations which could help their PC and server businesses, too. 

The big loser in this is HP. IBM will be hurt, too, especially in the cloud and storage businesses."

Dell. EMC. HP. Cisco. These Tech Giants Are the Walking Dead | WIRED