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Here is the latest installment for CPU Magazine. It's been a heck of a week, I'm hanging in Seattle currently - on my way to New York next week. What a great week though, amazing U.S. election and there's a ton of buzz happening on the streets of Seattle lately. The economy is still the biggest concern on everyone's mind, and so this month I'm covering job hunting in a tough economy.

After the recent stock market crash, bank shutdowns, and home foreclosures, millions of people are worried about their current and future job prospects. Companies everywhere are in hiring freezes, dramatically shrinking the pool of good, available jobs and making it very difficult for managers to requisition new positions. And not just in North America; this economic slowdown has been a global event, so no one is immune, save possibly healthcare workers and (of course) the very wealthy.

The bottom line is we have been thrown into an employment situation direr than most of us have experienced in our lifetimes and hopefully none of us will have to experience again.

So what do you do if you’re just out of school and you are looking for a job in the technology industry? The answer is quite simple: specialize and differentiate yourself from the pack. The fact is, when you are looking for a job in a field where there are millions like you out there, millions of people who know basically what you know, it’s going to be hard to find the dream career that you can grow into.

In some ways, it’s very much like starting a business in a highly commoditized industry. For years, I ran a small business and took it through many highs and lows. Along the way, we discovered that if we didn’t find some way to differentiate ourselves from the pack, we would be left in the dust in challenging times.

So here you are, a blank sheet of paper. Now what?

The first thing you want to do is figure out what you actually enjoy doing. Take it from me; if you are lucky enough to find a job that involves something that you enjoy doing, you won’t think of it as just a job. In addition, in many cases it may be something that you can excel at without extensive prequalification.

This doesn’t mean if you enjoy playing Guitar Hero that you go out and start your own band. Be realistic; if you enjoy playing video games, you might want to upgrade your skill set by taking some courses on game development. In the meantime, you could find a job in a company that allows you to develop scripts and work with network infrastructure.

The next thing would be to look at what holes you could fill in a particular growth industry or company—and you should also look for opportunities based on future trends as much as possible. There are going to be many opportunities in environmental management and control, healthcare, and other high-tech initiatives. This doesn’t mean you need to be an expert on the environment, but there are companies that focus on the environment that require IT skills. The same goes for healthcare and every other growth sector.

This might require some research, but most likely it’s nothing that Google can’t help you with. In other words, don’t just create a generic résumé and blanket email it out. I can’t tell you how many times people email me their résumés without any correspondence or any description of what exactly they’re doing emailing me in the first place.

Be absolutely sure you make a cover page tailored to the company and the position you are looking for. If you’re unfamiliar with the various résumé formatting rules, it’s easy to find good samples online—there are even companies out there that will draft your résumé for you for a small fee.

Finally, make sure you do some research on a company before you show up there for an interview; few things will make you look worse than being unable to answer basic questions about what the company is or does.

 

rs

 

 

Tomorrow is a day that will go down in history as one of the most important elections of our time. I would encourage all Americans to go out and vote! As well, here is this weeks "Bug the Bench" question. We will be sending John a 2 Gigabyte USB stick for his question.

 

I wrote this article for the latest issue of CPU Magazine... Check it out here...

 

Absolute power can bring governments, companies, and leaders to their knees. Remember where Intel was three years ago? They were getting smoked by a smaller competitor, a much smaller competitor, who found a weakness and capitalized on it. Well, things certainly changed; Intel, humbled by its own arrogance and schooled by its largest yet tiny competitor, completely changed the way it does business.

There was a time not so long ago when Nvidia was the darling of Wall Street. The company seemed so laser-focused in its execution, and it rarely missed a step. And even when it did make a mistake, Nvidia only let its competitors (OK, competitor) slide by temporarily; there was no denying that, and Nvidia’s level of innovation was beyond the competition in the graphics market. In the chipset space, Nvidia was doing some amazing things and practically owned the high-end business. The company’s chips were reliable, simple to integrate, and they only had the features that their customers wanted. The nForce was truly the Ferrari of chipsets. Then, of course, there was SLI technology, which Nvidia acquired from 3Dfx, and it was so popular among gamers that it has become the industry standard for multiple-GPU graphics subsystems.

Things were going very well for Nvidia. So well, in fact, that some believe the company’s leadership became overconfident to the point where they decided to take on Intel head to head in a no-holds-barred ego match to increase their platform’s real estate inside the PC. The strategic choices that Nvidia made paved the way for one of the most brutal behind-the-scenes wars that I have ever seen in the industry. Nvidia broke one of Sun Tzu’s cardinal rules: Never take on a giant head to head, no matter how strong you think you are. Instead of looking for holes that needed filling and plugging them, Nvidia focused on growth and market domination, a risky strategy from one of the most aggressive CEOs around.

Somewhere in the struggle to create increasingly competitive platforms, Nvidia lost its focus on its key competitor, AMD-ATI, simultaneously reinvigorating its new competitor, Intel. There’s no doubt in my mind that the Intel monster will come out swinging when the time is right. Intel’s chipset dominance in midrange and value-priced PCs is nothing new, but that dominance is now spreading into the high-end personal computer business. It seems now that Intel can do no wrong, and we’ve all seen where that can take a company.

In this industry, as in any, it is very clear that if you take your eyes off the road and get caught in your own arrogance, you will lose. We have all been there, including my company, and in the end we became a much stronger company than we were before. Luckily for us, we did not have shareholders to answer to at the time, but in the case of companies such as AMD, Intel, and Nvidia, dealing with shareholder concerns can be just as difficult as reconciling customer issues.

There are no two ways about it; Nvidia has a long road ahead of it to fix what’s broken. The company may be forced to get into the CPU business, which kind of sucks because it may cloud Nvidia’s focus in other areas. On the other hand, with some strategic acquisitions the company may come out on top again, and I am excited about Nvidia’s push for visual computing. I think it brings much-needed value to the high-end GPU space, and it may bring seriously needed value to the multi-GPU space, as well. Hopefully next time Nvidia is riding high it will remember where it came from and the reasons for its success.

These, of course, are my own personal views and not those of the company I work for. Signing off until next month . . . .

 

rs

» Click here to download the new Voodoo theme! «

With the economy going the way it is and the most exciting election of our time just around the corner, I haven't had much to blog about.

 

This election is probably the most important of our time; I would encourage all of our readers to watch the various networks and form an opinion so you can get out and vote. Tomorrow will be a landmark debate; I can't wait for it to happen.

Next week I will be in Seattle so if anyone out there has anything interesting for me to see just drop me a note.

By the way, my hand is still in a cast and so I am using voice dictation still. I figure by the time this is all over, I will continue to use voice dictation test my daily input method.

 

rs

www.rahulsood.com

 

So lately I've been hanging out in Seattle as I recover from my broken hand. I had a series of interviews yesterday, as we started sending out the new Envy notebooks to reviewers. You want to know what's cool? DragonDictate NaturallySpeaking, it works amazing!

Anyways, posted today.

No, the rumors aren’t true. As confirmed earlier today, Voodoo is not being shut down by HP. In fact, according to Rahul Sood, Chief Technology Officer for the Hewlett Packard Global Voodoo Business Unit, HP is pumping more money into the brand—even if layoffs may be occurring in the background. The goal is to ramp up production of sweet-looking machines like the Envy 133 (we just received today) in order to get them to market faster and to take Voodoo global. But Sood had a lot more to say to LAPTOP on a wide variety of other subjects, ranging from how the Envy 133 stacks up against the Macbook Air to whether consumers want to plop down more than two grand for an ultraportable at all given the state of the economy. As it turns out, though, you can use this system to look for jobs!

Some customers have complained about delays with the Voodoo Envy. Was there ever a promised ship date?

We never gave a specific ship date. We just said that we’re announcing the product and pre-launching it, and then we’re going to start shipping sometime in the fall. It slipped between two and three weeks in September. We actually did start telling customers in September that they should start seeing their products early September or in October. But the challenge for us was that we’re using carbon fiber material which is very fine material and getting the yield up and getting it to a point where we were able to produce enough volume was a challenge, but we’re all good to go now.

Do you feel like you’re able to meet demand now, or is it a wait-and-see kind of situation?

So far, we’re able to meet demand. The thing that we’re doing now — thanks to overwhelming success— is integrating Voodoo into the larger HP engine.

There were some rumors floating around recently that HP was shutting down Voodoo. Can you set the record straight?

That’s just not the case. The Envy was received overwhelmingly positively in Berlin. And because we’re not able to produce the volume we need to scale it into an extremely large global SKU, one of the things that we’re doing that will benefit us in the future is integrating the Voodoo business into the larger execution engine of HP. So, for example, there’ll be Voodoo people sitting on the notebook team of HP and creating not only notebooks for Voodoo, but also helping with notebooks for HP and Compaq.

The idea is that it will be managed by a larger team who is already set up for global scale and global growth, and they’re going to help us scale out a lot quicker than we were able to do it before.

Do you feel that Voodoo will be able to remain autonomous, or do you feel that the brand might be compromised?

Autonomy is not necessarily a good thing in this case. We’ve learned over the past two years that we’re a much stronger company working together than we are apart. And as far as the design or our flexibility, I think that what you will see is a lot of influence from Voodoo on the HP portfolio and our overall portfolio will become a lot nicer. So it’s definitely not a negative.

It’s a really good thing for us. And integrating into the HP engine, not only in the notebook business but in the desktop business as well, is a huge deal for us.

Why didn’t you say anything publicly sooner?

I broke my hand and I’ve just kind of been recovering, but yeah, it’s going to be good man. Our next launch is a very cool notebook; very unique that will be coming out down the road. It’s going to take everything that we’ve learned and put it up to a much greater scale.

Will your next notebook sport a larger display and function more like an entertainment notebook than an ultraportable?

It’ll be fair to say that it’ll be badass.

Because the Envy 133 was announced months ago, other ultraportables have surpassed it on the specs front, namely with Centrino 2 and larger-sized SSDs. How soon can you refresh the Envy in order to catch up?

This notebook is not really just about the specs. It’s not about the processing power and stuff like that. The innovations that we have in there are designed for a really specific user. Quite frankly, there are people out there who love the style, love the design, and love the feature set that comes with it. The specifications of a competing product, even though they may put a faster processor in there, [that product] is thicker, it’s not as nice, it doesn’t use the same materials as ours. This notebook was designed with a very specific user in mind. Going forward, I imagine that you’ll see a refresh and we’ll update our portfolio as we go along. I can’t be specific about that. But what I can tell you is the people that are buying this notebook don’t look at the most recent specs.

What is the target audience of the Envy 133 then?

Well, the target audience is looking for mobile performance. They want decent battery life. They want it to be lightweight. They want it to look cool. It’s a lifestyle thing. It’s not just about the speed, it’s about the overall experience. The target audience that’s buying the Envy is buying it based on a number of factors.

But, as you say, there are new technologies coming out and you want to make sure that things are refreshed as quickly as possible. Those are they kind of things that we are working on. We’ll refresh when we feel that the technology is good enough to go into an ultra-thin product like this.

What can you tell us about the gesture support that’s built into the touchpad? What can you do with it?

They’re a couple of things. It’s a Synaptics touchpad and there is a driver in there that’s continually being updated. And what we’ve done is enable the touchpad to be used with two-finger touch. You can use the pinch gesture and take your fingers, put them together, then pull them apart to zoom in and out of documents. Other things, like scrolling, for instance, is a single finger gesture or a position gesture. So basically, to scroll, put your finger on the right-hand side of the touchpad, hold it there, and you’ll see a scroll icon. Then you can move [your finger] up and down to scroll. The same thing goes for a horizontal scroll. You hold your finger on the bottom of the touchpad. You can also adjust the area of scroll as well. With the Synaptics driver, it’s pretty flexible, and we’re continuing to work with them on making new gestures.

One of the other unique features is the instant-on OS, which is using Splashtop technology. Do you feel like your implementation is better than that of ASUS?

It’s completely different. Ours is completely custom from anyone else. Splashtop is just the enabler, but the actual interface is a much cooler design.

How would you say the Voodoo Envy 133 stacks up against the Macbook Air and the Lenovo X300?

Well, the closest competitor would be the Air. I look at the Lenovo and I think it’s a sort of completely different product. But looking at the Air, for example, the Envy is thinner, it uses material that is much nicer, it’s much more exotic looking, and it’s got a lot of features that you would think are perceived negatives but are actual positives. Like the Presentation Adapter. Like the E-SATA optical drive as opposed to a USB port. It’s got a very very bright display. The display is better than the Air. It’s better than the Lenovo.

The speaker system is really awesome. Believe it or not, we were able to tweak the audio so that it actually sounds pretty good for a notebook [of the Envy’s size]. That’s almost impossible to do, but we got some excellent audio out of it. We got a better microphone, too. We have audio-freaks working on our team so we got a better speaker/microphone system. Instead of having a mono speaker, it’s got stereo speakers. When you’re using Skype, for example, you don’t need a headset.

Given the state of the economy, do you feel that there’s more or less of an appetite for luxury notebooks than there was 6 to 12 months ago?

When you have a situation like the one we have now, which is a very unique situation, people won’t go out and buy cars or houses or that sort of thing, but this [a notebook] is a sort of feel-good thing. It’s a relatively inexpensive purchase to go out and buy a notebook.

It’s two things, really. One is if people are at home and they lost their job or something and they need to go out and look for another one, they obviously need a computer to do that.

There’s also a market of people out there where the economy doesn’t affect them, so they’re still out there buying things. It’s one of those things, where we haven’t really seen a huge impact yet, so I’m not really sure how it’ll affect us longterm. But we’re hoping that the global scale that HP is going to give us will allow us to go into markets that aren’t being affected. Markets like Russia, India, and Dubai, places where economies that are strong might balance out places where the economy isn’t so strong.

Great Job Rob, I couldn't have said it better myself. I couldn't have typed it either - still nursing broken hand.

Is HP's Voodoo PC Unit Finished?
Digital Trends, 9/29, Rob Enderle

It seems that a number of people are lamenting the passing of Voodoo, the high-end gaming company that HP bought in 2006, and more recently, is rumored to have killed off. But the brand and products aren't going away. The unit is simply being merged into HP. This will mean a number of changes for Voodoo, most good, some possibly bad depending on where
you sit. None of this is unusual. Cadillac and Lincoln started out as separate companies at one time and now, decades later, they continue to be distinct from other GM and Ford products.

Let's chat about why people likely got excited in the first place, and what the future holds for Voodoo.

The Scary Part of an Acquisition

I've been part of an acquisition three times in my career, and can categorically say, as an employee at any level in a company: Being acquired tends to suck if you don't like change. The bigger the differences between the acquired company and the company doing the buying, the greater the process is likely to suck. People who like to work for small companies often don't fit into large enterprises easily, and it is hardly unusual for the smaller firm to find its offices shut down and the employees, or their jobs, moved to the larger firm to
contain costs.'

That is likely how the news of the Voodoo change leaked out. I expect that an employee who really didn't like the idea of relocating decided to leak the information out about the consolidation, in the hope that the Voodoo fan base would go ballistic and stop the changes. I've actually never seen this happen, and the result, typically, is a much higher level of distrust between the parent company and the one that was acquired.

Also, when you are talking companies of HP's scale, they can typically trace down the leak. And if they find you, the words "career limiting" are generally an understatement. Your only real choices are to either suck the change up, or take a package (assuming there is one) and go work someplace else. In this economy, I'm thinking the second choice may not be the best one.

What This Means for Voodoo

For some time now, functions like marketing had already been shifting from Voodoo to HP, and many of the most creative people had been moving into HP to assist with projects ranging from the HP Blackbird to enterprise workstations and servers. To Voodoo's advantage, it gained access to the massive HP labs facility, and the technology contained within it. Much of what's inside (and I always get the mental image of the warehouse in the first and last Indiana Jones movies) has never seen the light of day.

Taking a bunch of creative types and giving them access to cutting-edge super-secret enterprise tech is like letting a little kid who loves candy into a candy store, unsupervised. The eyes get big, the pockets fill up, and hopefully something sweet results.

The new Omen and Envy resulted from just the initial light merging of the two firms, and now the plan is to take the Voodoo brand worldwide, with a broader line and even more interesting products. While this is happening, some of the concepts being used to create these high-end Voodoo offerings are also migrating down into HP branded products that
the rest of us can afford, substantially enriching the HP line. So there will be both an increasing number of premium Voodoo branded products, and HP products with Voodoo DNA, like the Blackbird PC.

You may recall that HP makes smartphones, and has a bunch of ex-Apple people helping to create their next-generation phone. You may not, however, have thought through the likely coming of a Voodoo phone, which might actually surprise both Apple and Google, who also have likely not thought of it. This is the kind of thing that the consolidation of these
two units makes possible.

Wrapping Up

When a large company buys a much smaller one, change is inevitable. If they remain separate, there is a high likelihood that the effort will fail and the unit will either be shut down, or sold. That isn't happening here. Voodoo is not only becoming part of HP, it's changing the firm, helping to make it more dynamic and exciting. Given that few of us can afford Voodoo-branded products, but virtually all of us can afford HP products, this gives more of us a chance to own cool stuff. It is hard to argue that this isn't a good thing, while we wait for the Voodoo HP smartphone.

 

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rs

www.rahulsood.com

I wrote this article for the latest issue of CPU Magazine, it's about the recent announement that Intel is jumping in to the solid state hard drive business.

I have been writing quite a bit about Intel lately, often about the company’s quest to increase its platform real estate from within a personal computer. Last month I touched a bit on Intel’s much-anticipated Larrabee graphics platform; this month I’m writing about the chipmaker’s solid-state drives. Unless you’re living in a Unabomber shack somewhere in the deep woods, you probably heard that Intel announced its new SSDs at IDF this year.

Let me start by saying that I have a pair of these babies running in my Blackbird PC in RAID 0. Based on my experience, Intel has completely changed the game with these drives. Not only has the company made SSD relevant in high-performance scenarios, but through some complex algorithm management, Intel has managed to wipe the floor with any other storage technology on the planet.

Of course performance is important, but what about battery life and drive efficiency for notebook applications? Months ago, Tom’s Hardware wrote about the SSD battery life issue. They missed a few points, one of the most notable being that there is a direct correlation between the efficiency and performance of the drive and the overall battery life on the device. In other words, the slower the SSD, the longer it takes to run a task, thus the more battery life it eats. This is not the case with Intel drives; they are fast, efficient, and they actually extend the battery life of the machine compared to other SSDs. After installing a pair of them drives in RAID, my system literally boots Windows Vista Ultimate in seconds. Overall, I would say these new SSD drives rock, both in notebook applications and in desktops.

You might wonder what this means for Intel, and you wouldn’t be alone. My guess is the company is working to increase its aforementioned platform real estate through technologies like NAND, SSD, chipsets, CPUs, wireless, and soon through graphics. Imagine if Intel can pull off the seemingly impossible by making its next-generation graphics much better the previous Intel Extreme graphics. I’m not speaking from insider information here; I’m simply guessing that Intel has some incredible things in the back room at the moment, based in part on rumors that the company is apparently hiring some of the best graphics engineers in the industry. I can only imagine what the new Centrino will be like; after all, if the company can suddenly jump into the storage business with an industry-leading product, then anything is possible.

The industry is changing. The days where customers would spend thousands of dollars on a huge, 2-kilowatt, multi-GPU desktop PC just to play one game well are almost gone. People are generally very well-informed in making buying decisions, and they’re looking for “greener,” more efficient PCs. They want a system that works and supports all of their applications.

So, what’s the point?

If Intel can pull off creating the ultimate integrated graphics part, it will likely make third-party discrete graphics irrelevant in notebooks. Why would anyone want to integrate a third-party discrete chipset when all you need is an Intel processor combined with whatever Centrino-branded devices you need to create a hardware simple platform? Now throw in the Intel SSD and you have a bigger, even uglier Intel than you do today.

As a builder of systems, I’ve learned that the success in this industry isn’t as simple as taking the best components and tossing them into a box. The secret is to look at what companies like Intel are doing, listen to what your customers are looking for, and work backward into cool, innovative new products. As such, we spend a lot of time imagining ways to create thinner, lighter, less expensive, and more powerful devices. Yeah, it’s a continuing process, and Intel seems to be leading the way, again.

 

rs