Mitch's Blog

Apple Intelligence is better than Siri used to be, but it is now more annoying, because “almost good” is more annoying than “bad.”

I’m trying to decide if I can throw a mention of Y2K into a report without explaining it. Millennials were in their teens during the remediation and Gen Z were in preschool.

ServiceNow cuts network incidents 90% with HPE Mist AI

ServiceNow’s network team used to spend 2,000 to 3,000 hours a year patching the network. Now it’s fewer than 60. After moving its network operations to Juniper Networks Mist AI, now part of HPE ServiceNow cut incident volume 90%, and the network team didn’t grow even as the company did.

Coming up: a 100% autonomous network by 2028. ServiceNow’s Sajeev Nair says the way to get there is to hand control to the AI a step at a time.

My latest on Fierce Network from Nair’s fireside chat with HPE’s Rami Rahim at HPE’s Networking Investor Day.

I got this in email.

P.J. Vogt, host of the Search Engine podcast, interviews writer Meghan O’Gieblyn, “who started lying to herself about her relationship to alcohol and God. And afterwards wondered: when did it start? Why did it happen? How do you make peace with the part of yourself that wants something that could destroy you?”

“There’s this ideal state of wholeness that I think is the motivation for so many religious disciplines or spiritual disciplines. This idea that, oh, if I can finally let go of my ego, I’ll finally be at peace with myself, and I won’t be arguing with myself.”

O’Gieblyn talks about surrendering to addiction as ecstatic experience.

I am not an alcoholic or an addict (other than caffeine, which I don’t think counts for this type of discussion). I was a heavy smoker and compulsive eater at one time. I am very familiar with having a constant, self-critical voice in my head and I can absolutely understand the temptation to do a thing that shuts that voice down, even if doing that thing burns your life down in the process.

I think I will read her book next. It’s “Will and Attention.”

Huawei’s secret weapon wasn’t the CCP. It was IBM

How did Huawei become one of the world’s most formidable tech companies? Washington blames the CCP. But Huawei’s rotating chairman, Eric Xu, credits IBM.

Huawei paid IBM nearly $600 million between 1997 and 2006 to build a product development system that put customers first. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley bet that money could create markets, then watched the dot-com and optical bubbles burst.

My colleague Steve Saunders argues America is repeating the mistake with debt-fueled AI data centers, while Huawei builds the integrated stack for AI in the physical world.

China builds industry to serve customers and the interests of China. The U.S. builds businesses to enrich billionaires.

Why is Meta building pervert glasses? It’s not because people want to replace their phones – people love their phones. It’s because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the phone is an obstacle to him becoming a trillionaire.

HPE won’t merge Aruba Central and Mist, but the platforms will share AI, applications and hardware

My latest on Fierce Network: Merging Aruba Central and Juniper Mist is unnecessary, HPE networking chief Rami Rahim says.

Instead, HPE is converging what’s underneath, sharing its Marvis AI engine and new access points and switches across both platforms.

HPE trails Cisco, the campus networking big dog, and Cisco is growing nearly four times faster, according to analyst reports. HPE says it’s integrating faster than Cisco did with Meraki, but the market numbers don’t show it yet.