A blog by us for our family and friends
Wow what a historic day. At 11:01 CNN projects Barack Obama the first African American president of the united states of America. How far we have come, electing a man of color because he was the best man for the job. Who would have imagined this even five years ago? We Americans are moving forward and should be proud.
My faith in Pennsylvania has been restored. Despite heavy campaigning, voter intimidation, and deceitful negative ads, my fellow Pennsylvanians have come through, seen through all the bs and voted for senator Obama.
Now the question is, at the national level will Obama have a mandate, or will it be too close for swift and significant change?
Well at 4:55 we placed our vote for Obama. I was totally shocked that we basically walked in and voted. Maybe we just hit a good time of day? Most of the guys at work were reporting as much as three hour lines, so this was quite a suprise.
So anyways I guess well be watching CNN anxiously waiting for the results to come in. Gobama!
Finally, it’s here.
As I drove into work this morning through phoenixville it was obvious that this is going to be a record turnout. Poll after poll had lines around the block just like we saw on the pictures of Ohio and Florida.
Absolutely amazing. Clearly I hope that Barack Obama wins, preferably by a landslide margin, but this is really the first time that I can remember that people were so motivated to care one way or the other.
As the election is starting to come down to the wire, we’ve started to receive a few very disturbing phone calls. First, let me say that I’ve been shocked that I have not received any phone calls from either the McCain or Obama campaigns. We live right in the middle of the Philadelphia western suburbs in Pennsylvania, which is one of the hot spots right now. Historically the western suburbs are “light pink”, ever so slightly Republican in the west and a smidge more in the north as you hit the end of the bible thumpers. This year however the western suburbs seem to be pretty solidly blue, which I’m thankful for. But the fact remains that I would have expected to have received a call from the McCain campaign by now.
So I titled this post robo-calls for a reason. Tonight we did not receive a call from the McCain camp, nor was it from the Republican party that I’m aware of specifically. The call came up on caller ID as “Poll” so I though, hmm I’m being called for an election poll. How cool. Neat-o. Well, let me tell you how this went:
“Poll”: This is a national poll being conducted. This will take 45 seconds of your time. Do you plan to vote this year?
John: Yes
“Poll”: The candidates are John McCain and Mr Obama. Have you decided who you will vote for?
John: Yes
“Poll”: Are you planning to vote for John McCain?
John: No
“Poll”: Are you planning to vote for Mr. Obama?
John: Yes
“Poll”: Which do you worry about more? Abortion and Gay Marriage, or the Failing Economy?
John: The Failing Economy
“Poll”: Are you aware that Mr. Obama has been taking advice from the former CEO of the failed Freddie Mae?
John: No Just because he spoke with him a long time ago doesn’t make the former CEO an adviser!
“Poll”: Fact - Mr. Obama has been taking advice from a corrupt CEO that swindled Freddie Mae out of billions of dollars and is responsible for the mortgage crisis
Ok, so this went on and on, and I have to say I’m really upset by this. First, this was not a poll. This was a very slimy campagn to smear Senator Barack Obama (notice the poll didn’t even give him a first name, simply ‘mr’). I understand John McCain’s negative tactics even though I feel they are way over the edge, but this was blatent smear tactics here. First, asking me which I care more about Gay Marriage/Abortion or Economy? Give me a break, Gay Marriage and Abortion are two separate issues that cannot possibly be connected to each other. Second, neither of these issues has played a prominent part in this year’s election so why bring it up? For the record, I support both the Right to Choose as well as Gay Marriage. I’m not a left wing liberal, but I do believe in these things, at least conceptually.
Anyways, so back to the poll. How is this fighting fair? Even BUSH didn’t resort to these tactics, and to be honest, this does not help John McCain win. Maybe if they were targeting someone who was uneducated or easily swayed, but here they are calling someone who lives in an area where more than 20% of adults have post-graduate degrees (I have two), the average family income is over $120K, and most people consider themselves somewhere down the middle. In my own circles, most everyone I know has done their own research on the two candidates and made their own rational decisions. In my opinion, this experience made me want to vote for John McCain even less than I already do.
I think it’s been very telling, to me at least, that McCain’s ads have been so negative and Obama’s ads have for the most part been positive. Moving past the negativity, I am having a hard time grasping the ethics behind the McCain ads. Generally from what I’ve seen, attack ads may be negative but they usually don’t straddle that line into bad ethics and bad morality but John McCain’s ads and speeches that take Joe Biden’s comment about the next president being tested out of context really bothers me. How can someone ethically take a comment saying that the next president will be tested and that Obama has a spine of steel and turn that into a negative ad by omitting the last half of the comment? It’s true that every president in the history of this country has been tested either from internal sources or external sources sometime early on in his presidency - wether it’s WWI/II, the great depression, vietnam, bay of pigs, the civil war, collapse of the asian economy, terrorism or domestic economic freefall, the president will always be tested.
The question is, do we want someone who can be level headed about things, or do we want someone who thinks the military is the solution to everything and that the world is black and white? Got news for you John McCain, the world is not black and white. You are the wrong choice and the poor values you eschew in your own ads only makes me believe that more and more every day.
I don’t normally care all that much about baseball but this is very exciting having our home team in the match. Of course leave it to Philadelphia to host a historic freezeout game but tonight we’ll finish that off tonight.
So…
GO PHILLIES
So when does a stock get delisted? Unisys is currently trading at $1.26 and in my eyes may actually fall below $1 if things continue to go the way they have been. I think we’ve been undervalued for years but this is pretty concerning.
On the other hand I think it would be a good thing for us if the company were to become privatized.
Does Sarah Palin actually believe the words that come out of her mouth? How is it that a republican regime can start two wars, oversee a crashing economy, alienate all of our allies, and then criticize someone who wants to balance the budget and make life better for the average family?
So no one like higher taxes, but that’s what happens when you fight two wars, while at the same time cutting taxes and giving multiple tax refunds. How is that fiscally responsible? If mr Joe Plumber makes more than a quarter million dollars a year than he’ll yes I expect him to pay more taxes and a higher rate than some making half that. How is that socialist?
What is a real American? It seems that according to Mrs Palin that only gun toting , bible thumping citizens living in so-called red states who voted my potato head into office are “real Americans.”. What about me? I pay my taxes, go to work everyday trying to add my small imprint onto the American economy and ip landscape,but I live in a blue state, does that mean I’m a fake American?
News flash, I’m a real American and I don’t support you Sarah because I don’t like the way you view the world.
Oh and since whenis unconditionally sitting down and talking with your enemy equal surrender? Your own fabled Ronald Regan did exactly that and brought about the end of the cold war. Was that surrender? Because if it was it doesn’t seem all that bad to me.
End rant.
So about two weeks ago now my nice shiny hp laptop died at the ripe old age of18 months. Rip my friend. I wonder how much I can part it out on eBay???
I decided I’m done with laptops. Too much trouble than they’re worth to be honest. So after looking at dell I descovered that even after my employee discount through both Unisys and PPA, I just couldn’t beat the price of doing it myself. So ok and behold last Saturday I found myself on newegg.com pricing out all the components of my new desktop.
What a wonderful choice. The parts all showed up on Tuesday and off I went putting everything together, starting with the intel quad core Q9550 and 4 gigs of ram. This thing screams and relative to a similar dell it was a steal.
Moral of the story is why pay someone else a middle man fee whenyou can just as easily do it yourself.
A few weeks back my employer, Unisys, announced that our current CEO Joe McGrath (commonly referred to as Big Joe) would be stepping down. Those of us in the ranks rejoiced, singing in the halls, drinking merrily and whatnot. I started at Unisys in May of 2000 for my internship and then full time since June of 2001. When I started here, the stock price was high, business was decent and we were doing real exciting engineering work. In 2004 Joe McGrath became the President and a year later the CEO and now the stock price is under $2, 80% of my coworkers have been laid off and I’m managing one of only two approved hardware development projects.
Can this all be laid of Joe’s feet? Well not really, or at least not fairly but at the end of the day, it’s his responsibility to maximize employee and shareholder value. And he just wasn’t doing that. Unisys is a company with a long tradition of being runner up in the hardware world, mostly because Marketing is poor. Frequently Unisys’ products are superior, but as they say, “no one was ever fired for choosing Blue [IBM].” That said, Joe has attempted to completely dismantle the hardware development portion of the company and focus on services.
Ok, let’s examine that. A service to us covers a whole broad range of things from running TSA’s systems, the airport in Beijing (yes if you flew to the Olympics, you were in one of our systems), to processing something like 90% of the world’s checking transactions. We also provide the outsourced support for Dell (so if you call Dell customer support you are really talking to a Dell-trained Unisys employee), countless help desks around the world, and what we had hoped would be our bread and butter - IT infrastructure consolidation.
The problem is, that services are hard to get, require a lot of specialized skill, have a low level of reusability, and have low margins. Not to mention that depending on the economic tides, insource vs. outsource is constantly in flux. Two years ago there was huge outsource momentum. Will that reverse course and will we again favor insourcing sometime in the next five years? I think that’s probably pretty likely.
Meanwhile, hardware is something that is purely a function of utility. If you play in the Intel space, you could take say, an IBM piece of metal and a Unisys machine, compare them and then based on feature content and price purchase a machine that will have some amount of capacity and when you run out of capacity then you go out and either replace that machine with something that has more capacity or you add another machine and say, double or triple your capacity. Imagine Amazon and the amount of transactions they handle a day. If their customer base is growing, then they will buy new hardware. End of story. So if you have good hardware, good marketing and a good reputation then selling your wares shouldn’t be too difficult right?
So to bring things back to Joe, his strategy has been to lay off all those guys building the hardware, which accounts for a significant amount of Unisys’ revenue. We just announced and are about to release the last Intel-based server that we plan to design fully in house (ok, so NEC is also selling this box, and unfortunately taking a lot of the design credit when in fact their contribution was very very small). This to me shows a lack of vision at the senior level and a knee jerk reaction. We’ve been building scale up machines because that’s where marketing thought the market would go. If they told us build a blade server, we would - and chances are it would beat the socks off anyone else out there. But instead we will be OEMing a blade server.
Clearly based on revenue and stock prices something has got to change. And change starts at the top. We don’t need a stuffy, arrogant and boring leader. We need vision. We need someone who can motivate us and inspire confidence that we will still be here next year, in three years and maybe even in five years. I’m leading a three year project, and I’m not even sure we’ll be in business when it’s supposed to complete. How sad is that.
