Bravo.

I don’t think those headlines are sad or unusual at all. In j-school, they teach that, like it or not, the average reader of a newspaper is reading at a 4th grade level and that the great challenge of the competent journalist is to take complicated stories and tell them in a way that makes sense to those readers. Readers know what ipods are, they may not be as intimately familiar with megabytes and burn rates. Sure, this may mean some “dumbing down”, but that’s the way (good) general media writing goes.

Sorry for the name mixup: I read the piece…but in NetNewsWire. I just didn’t check the byline: in the feedreader it’s not quite as obvious as it is on the site here. However, I should have checked that.

The reason for picking on this particular item to kick off my post was simply because it helped make the point that IBM has tried to portray domain-wall memory as if it’s all IBM on its own (Big Blue has form for this, especially when it comes to memory technology). The line “these guys question everything” was too handy to pass up.

Thanks for the link to Chris Edwards post. I take issue with how he characterizes our report, which is just a simple news report pointing out a breakthrough by IBM Research. We like to do that. Secondly, Edwards incorrectly says I wrote the piece, while Stacey is the writer. Sort of tells me, he didn’t read our little report. Otherwise it is an awesome piece.

Having said that, we don’t make any assertion that this is showing up tomorrow. In fact we left the sensationalization of the press release to The Times of London, the bastion of tech reporting these days.

The good news is that it appears like we’ll have plenty of options going forward. But knowing that many new memory types are scheduled to arrive in the coming years, we need to turn our attention to how to make the most effective use of these various memory types in data center systems.