
Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead - flying_whale
http://www.wired.com/2015/10/meet-walking-dead-hp-cisco-dell-emc-ibm-oracle
======
iheartmemcache
This is such a perception skewed by Silicon-Valley-Syndrome.

This is how the rest of the world works -- I run an import/export business and
have to manage logistics. It doesn't matter what industry, it could be crude
oil or widgets from China at half a penny a piece. It's my job as CIO to
choose an implementation.

I'm going to choose SAP or Dynamics (or one of the handful of other ERP's with
name recognition) on DB2 or Oracle. I'm going to store my data on EMC dual
array filers for HA and pay the tax. Why? Because if I choose node.js and
MongoDB to run my 3 warehouses and the system goes down, I'm getting voted out
next board meeting. If my SAP R/3 on IBM hardware goes down, they'll do the
dance and at least fly some people out to retain their image keeping your job
effectively safe.

Banks aren't going to move over from z/OS anytime soon. I don't want my
dialysis machine to be running on Riak.

~~~
mkozlows
So two things:

1\. Cloud providers are making it easy for legacy businesses to take baby
steps. You don't have to use a NoSQL solution with AWS Dynamo, you can use
Postgres with RDS. Or if you're hyper-conservative/stuck with legacy stuff,
you can run Oracle with RDS. Or get an EC2 instance and install your own
personal copy of Oracle on it. You don't have to jump to full modernity right
away, you can take the easy wins of hosted infrastructure first, and only
later move up to the bigger wins of hosted platforms.

2\. Yes, legacy stuff takes forever to disappear. There are still businesses
running VMS inside of VAX emulators with COBOL apps on them. But once you're
in that "super-conservative businesses won't move away from you anytime soon"
area, you're in a declining market. New businesses unencumbered by legacy
won't go down that road -- small businesses starting today will never buy an
on-site server to start with (thanks to Office 365/Google Apps/etc.), and as
they grow there's no reason for them to change that policy anymore. EMC might
never get a new customer, and even if they keep their old ones for some time,
it's just a question of how fast their decline is.

~~~
evook
Working at real scale, I'd choose some cages in a datacenter I can walk in and
place offices at over AWS anytime.

Btw you'd cry if I were allowed call out some companies that still run lotus
notes.

~~~
mkozlows
Lotus Notes is a fine example of what we're talking about. Yes, companies use
it, but no company is ever going to switch to Notes. The companies that use
Notes in 2020 is going to be the ones that use it in 2015 minus the ones that
quit using it. That's what "walking dead" means.

------
ap22213
First thing I thought when reading the headline was 'so is Oracle'. Glad it's
mentioned in the article.

AWS is absolutely killing it. Every release cycle, they put out quality
products that directly attack Oracle. And, Oracle is in the bad position of
having to eat their existing profitable business lines to compete.

Now, of course, cloud isn't here yet. There are certainly lots of issues
around security, auditing, privacy, data ownership, etc. But, the trend is
accelerating. Why? Because the cloud is so much cheaper. Why maintain and
manage your own data center and infrastructure for millions of dollars when
you can reliably outsource for a fraction?

I used to do a lot of work in the utility industry. I remember years ago
giving a presentation on the cloud. The audience was passionate that it'd
never, ever happen to them. They were extremely protective of their data. But,
then I slowly saw it happening anyway. It crept in slowly. The first to go
were the lowest risk systems. Then, the next lowest risk systems. Then, the
next.

The incumbents will hold position for a long time to come, propped up mainly
by government spending, hellishly long sales cycles, a corporate aversion to
micro products, and FUD. They have plenty of time to catch up. But will they?
That's the question. Unless oracle is actively researching new cloud platforms
(and I'm guessing they are), they're going to be in pain in 5 years.
Corporations that don't move to the cloud will be in a cost disadvantage.

On the other hand, serious work needs to be done to overcome the severe
limitations of the current cloud. Lots of certification and auditing and risk
assessments and SLAs need to happen.

~~~
exelius
Oracle is not quite as fucked as everyone else on the rest of the list. Oracle
has the benefit of offering products that solve very real, very complex
business problems: they aren't selling technology infrastructure. Oracle's
core products are largely around financial and operational automation, and
they are well understood by integrators across many industries. Their biggest
threat is something like Salesforce -- but even then, the capital cycle for
ERP systems is something stupid like 15-25 years. IBM is largely in the same
boat as Oracle, albeit with slightly more government focus.

Oracle is ultimately a software company. Where their customers run that
software is largely irrelevant to their core business. Is there margin to make
by running an Oracle cloud? Sure, but the bulk of their profits are made just
by licensing their LOB software packages and the associated annual support
contracts. Oracle will be fine, and Larry Ellison will be able to buy an even
bigger yacht in a decade.

~~~
fredkbloggs
The real reason Oracle is still making money (though never nearly as much as
analysts forecast) is none of the above. It was mentioned in the article and
has been discussed here many times in the past as well. For example,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10207495](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10207495)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9953657](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9953657).
Oracle's sales force is trained to use "license audits", threats of same, and
various forms of bundling, such as MSAs and minimum sales commitments, to sell
what Oracle wants to sell, not what the customer wants or needs. They are very
effective in this, and it is the primary reason Oracle remains in business.

That said, the Oracle database product, while extremely expensive and
obnoxiously licensed, is not without technical merit. There is a genuine
market for it, just not a $50b one. One could say the same for what these
other so-called dinosaurs are selling.

~~~
exelius
You're right about their sales practices -- and I've got more than one client
who are slowly ripping out every Oracle product they have as a result. Oracle
treats enterprise software sales like it's still the 90s, but in a lot of
their markets there is no other serious vendor.

Oracle makes the majority of their money off of industry-function-specific ERP
software that runs on top of their database platform. That's a market that's
very hard to disrupt or displace, because you have to develop deep domain
expertise in dozens of different industries and functions. Their technology
platform licenses often sneak in the back door -- the customer wants the
solution, and if they have to pay for the DB as part of the solution, then
it's just part of the price.

------
clavalle
The magic cloud. Good thing it is made of fairy dust rather than commodity
servers and network equipment or Dell and Cisco might be around forever
providing those things.

~~~
mkozlows
Facebook and Google and Amazon do not use Cisco networking equipment, nor do
they use Dell servers:

[http://www.wired.com/2014/11/facebooks-new-data-center-
bad-n...](http://www.wired.com/2014/11/facebooks-new-data-center-bad-news-
cisco/)

That's basically the point of the article: These companies that actually had
to get up to that kind of massive scale quickly discovered that the way hawked
by these big expensive "enterprise" companies didn't work. It was expensive
and insufficient. So they've developed their own custom stuff (often built on
open source; sometimes open sourced back out) that works a lot better while
also being massively cheaper.

AWS isn't just a bunch of Dell servers hooked up to EMC SANs and Cisco
switches. The only people who still use that stuff are people who a) have a
ton of money and a desire to spend it freely, plus b) don't have really
serious demands, which would mandate something better.

That's not a good place to be.

~~~
manigandham
Facebook, Google, Amazon (while big) are nowhere near the majority of the
servers used in the world.

~~~
a3voices
Are you sure? Internet traffic follows a power law distribution.

~~~
manigandham
Yes. What does internet traffic have to do with it?

There are millions of SMBs and tens of thousands of large corporations around
the world that own server hardware. A tiny percent of that is the major
internet companies.

The designs for hardware are changing but the providers are still going to be
the usual companies that are good at this and have all the manufacturing in
place. For example a lot of banks have started to switch to Open-Compute
designs [1] but they will still buy these from Dell or HP.

Software is a different story.

1\.
[http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/03/11/open-...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/03/11/open-
compute-wall-street-rethinking-data-center-hardware/)

------
ThomaszKrueger
I read somewhere that the cloud is just someone's else computer. At least in
the business I am working with that would never be allowed so if there is a
cloud to be had it will be on premises, which may keep these so-called walking
dead lumbering for quite some time.

~~~
adrianN
Yes, there are plenty of businesses which would never put their data on
someone else's servers.

Also, you should never underestimate corporate inertia. Switching to a new
system is immensely expensive, for many companies it won't happen, ever. Just
look how many companies are still using decade old hardware and scour ebay for
replacement 286 processors.

~~~
Karunamon
How much of that immense expense is due to various factors that can be summed
up as "obstinance", and how much is due to actual, practical, tangible
factors?

I'm not being snarky - I've seen many a large business make many a _horrible_
decision, not due to a dispassionate evaluation of the pros and cons of each
option, but because the people in charge hate change. And it's not that said
change would be necessarily painful or demonstrably bad, it's an irrational
bias.

Change hate appears to scale linearly with organizational size, more
specifically, number of managerial staff.

------
darmok
I was hoping for an informative well-written article. Alas, I was to be
disappointed. Ignoring the juvenile profanity and the condescending rhetoric,
the author completely misdiagnoses the technology shift that will be the real
game changer ... namely, the advances in memory architecture. Whether it's
memristors or Xpoint 3D or some other architecture, data storage will be
completely turned on its head over the next 10 years. The lumbering giants
(who bring in 4 times more in net profit in a single quarter than Pure Storage
garnered in its IPO) will have to be nimble in the future, but I wouldn't call
them the 'walking dead' just yet.

~~~
jb613
The point of exactly how profitable the "walking dead" are is vastly
underrated. The decision is between making giant profits now with low-risk VS
miniscule profits but potentially large future profits with high-risk.

------
exelius
They're the walking dead because they pursued scale over innovation. Once they
had achieved scale, they found themselves with too much momentum to innovate.
So because they couldn't innovate, they built an army of consultants to hawk
their wares to customers who also valued scale. But that consulting business
never really took off because its existence was predicated on a model of
dumping obsolete (but "enterprisey"!) hardware/software onto customers already
suffering from vendor lock-in. When those customers start to struggle (as they
inevitably will, because the tech industry is far from the only one where
scale can impede your ability to innovate) the market has moved on to a
different place, and the company never kept up. Then you see a death spiral of
layoffs and divestitures that destroys 50-90% of shareholder value.

Sound familiar? This fate awaits all these companies:

\- Dell: I don't even know what Dell makes anymore. I guess they sell PCs,
servers and consulting services to small businesses that don't know any
better. But this market is being eroded by an army of local MSPs and
resellers, and it's not a model that benefits from scale.

\- HP: HP has been a disaster for a while, but they will probably endure since
their hardware is generally pretty good and reasonably priced. But servers and
printers are not a very high-margin business, and that's caused their
leadership to be constantly on the hunt for a newer, higher-margin revenue
stream.

\- EMC: Storage is increasingly distributed, and EMC's centralized storage
solutions really are a dinosaur in today's market. They just make the wrong
product and never found anything to replace it.

\- Cisco: By all rights, Cisco shouldn't be on this list given that the
Internet still largely runs on their hardware. But they convinced themselves
they were a consulting company, and that ran off all their good engineers.
Cisco today is a shadow of its former self.

~~~
parasubvert
All of your examples seem to lack a lot of context. Yes, these companies are
all under pressure. But most of them are still in slow growth and working hard
at it. There is also quite a bit of innovation in these places. The problem is
the market model is changing - that innovation (cloud) undermines everything
else.

Their biggest liability is their customer base that IS NOT changing and
continues to pay for these products. I see guys everywhere trying to cajole
customers down the cloud path because they'd rather be at the seat of that
inevitable transition than pushed out. Many customers don't want to. So
they're stuck doing the old thing that's dying and the new thing is being done
by smaller customers that wouldn't even consider them.

The story of if/how they fail or rise again will be a lot more complicated
than you are suggesting. Keep in mind Apple was near bankruptcy 18 years ago.

Example - EMC. I'm not sure what you're talking about, there are a lot of
products. Isilon is distributed storage and selling like mad. ScaleIO is free
for anyone to use unsupported and a distributed Elastic Block Store. VxRack is
scale out compute and storage. XtremIO sells more and is growing at pace with
Pure (which just went public). Dell in swallowing them up which seems like the
least worst option given Elliott is at their back and HP would be a death
sentence. (I don't work at EMC, but a subsidiary and have some knowledge of
how they work and sell.)

~~~
exelius
Apple is a different beast... try not to think of them as a technology
company. The Apple that was a technology company died 18 years ago and was
reborn as a consumer products brand that is backed up by a hell of an
engineering org. But marketing/branding makes all the decisions and sets the
direction; engineering just helps move the needle of what's possible.

EMC is generally just fucked because their potential customer base is
shrinking. While I don't think everyone everywhere will move everything to the
cloud, enough migration is heading in that direction that storage appliances
seem like a risky business (especially considering the big cloud providers
just roll their own rather than buy from EMC).

Don't get me wrong -- I fight the same battles with big companies about how
their stupid new $50million data center can't hope to compete with AWS on
cost, reliability, security or functionality. AWS runs datacenters at the
billion dollar scale. CIOs/CTOs have the mindset of "it'll be better if we
control it" \-- but then don't realize how expensive it is to replicate all
the niceness that you get from AWS like management interfaces, workflow
control, etc. All those systems have to be grafted on later, and are naturally
behind the curve.

------
rvense
Fucked by Cloud and Fucked by Mobile are also apt terms to describe privacy...

------
anjc
Wtf is this article talking about?

Microsoft fucked because they have Windows on 95% of computers?

Agh, i'm too exasperated to continue my train of thought. Yes, everybody is
fucked because of Facebook and Google and MongoDB.

~~~
fredkbloggs
There's a lot of stupidity here (or perhaps one might charitably call it
excessive glee, or even plain old clickbait), but it's been a long time since
95% of computers ran Windows, if that was ever true in the first place.

You'd have to start by defining "computer". If we use a technically reasonable
but broad in journalism's terms definition of "device containing a CPU with
integrated MMU", then we're including every mainframe, server, desktop,
laptop, smartphone, tablet, industrial control system, laser printer or multi-
function document management system, router, network or storage switch,
storage system controller, sound mixer, and countless other devices. A very
small and diminishing fraction of those machines run Windows.

Even if you limited the definition to include only things we traditionally
think of as computers, namely mainframes, servers, desktops, and laptops,
Microsoft's market share is something like 30%, though it's very difficult to
measure and once again subject to definition; see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems).
And again, that's been declining for a long time. Even the most generous
interpretations that include only desktops and laptops don't get you to 95%;
you can narrow-definition your way up to about 90%, and that assumes "market
share" includes copies that were made in violation of license and/or law (and
thus for which Microsoft received no money).

The reality is that Microsoft is a niche player, not because they lost a
market they were previously winning but because that market itself became a
small part of something much bigger, in which Microsoft was never especially
competitive. As noted by the author, they've been investing heavily in
changing that, but the early returns aren't much to talk about. Windows
Mobile/Phone is a complete dud, Surface is a weak seller despite recent
improvements, and Azure is at best a very distant second in IAAS (see
[http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/05/28/gartn...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/05/28/gartner-
aws-pulls-further-ahead-in-iaas-cloud-market/)). What's remarkable is not that
Microsoft is doing so poorly but that they're the only enterprise computing
company that even appears to be trying. I think that's what the author was
expressing. The characterization as "fucked" comes from Ashlee Vance and
should be given the credibility one would assume considering the source.
There's little question that most of these companies' positions of relative
importance are in decline and have been for a long time. But some, especially
Microsoft, still have enormous sums of cash and businesses that are continuing
to generate more of it. However irrelevant such a company is, it's still a
long way from going out of business. Conversely, no amount of cash is a
substitute for organic sales growth.

~~~
anjc
I could have saved you some effort. By "computer" I meant "personal computer".
I presume that everybody here would understand that I didn't mean "device
which can compute", i.e. all servers, cash registers, calculators, difference
engines and Turing machines. I'd have thought that this would've been obvious
since I said 95% off the top of my head, and your very own link says 91.47%.

Microsoft are so far from niche it's unreal, and it shows a great ignorance on
behalf of the author to look at one product from one arm of a diverse
organisation, which has been at the forefront of CS research for decades, has
competences that Google et al absolutely do not, and compare it to other
companies which only have vague product-line overlap so blithely.

This is ignoring the manufacturing, supply chain management, distribution,
retail competences that the other mentioned companies have, which Google and
Facebook may _never_ have. It's also ignoring fundamental aspects of marketing
such as brand equity, positioning, etc. It's also ignoring the fact that some
of these companies are already embedded in industry, via their product line
and also via consultancy. Lastly, it's taking a single current snapshot of the
industry, and is ignoring the fundamentals of organisational strategy and
competition and capitalism, which would suggest that the companies mentioned
will adapt and compete to survive (in b4 Innovator's Dilemma). Not all
companies will do this successfully, but the companies mentioned will.

It seems like the author is judging these companies via their perception of a
small subset of their products, and the market's perception of them (some of
their share prices are up and down) without looking at the fundamentals of
each business, their diversification strategies, product line strategies,
their financial metrics (which the author could've looked up in 10 seconds),
and so on.

I mean to suggest that these companies are in trouble because of OSS such as
MongoDB, _which they have partnered with, support, and sell_ (and more than
likely funded at some point), is very silly, but that's precisely what the
author has done.

~~~
fredkbloggs
> By "computer" I meant "personal computer"

It's not 1992 any more. At the very minimum, it's reasonable to assume that
"computer" also includes mobile devices and servers, two additional markets
that are well-known to both technical and lay audiences.

> I presume that everybody here would understand that I didn't mean "device
> which can compute", i.e. all servers, cash registers, calculators,
> difference engines and Turing machines.

You haven't shown that you know what an MMU is. There's a reason I included
that; the definition excludes microcontrollers, devices that lack external
memory, and other things that clearly cannot run Windows or any other
competing operating system. Most of the devices you mention either don't have
CPUs or the CPUs they have don't have MMUs, and they're not part of the
Windows addressable market. Since you brought up Windows in the first place,
doesn't it make sense to limit ourselves to the general classes of computer on
which Windows could conceivably run?

> This is ignoring the manufacturing, supply chain management, distribution,
> retail competences that the other mentioned companies have, which Google and
> Facebook may never have.

I didn't mention either company. Both are advertising companies; Facebook
doesn't make any kind of product that competes with Windows, and Google's
competitor (Android) isn't really its own anyway, as the actual OS is Linux.

> Not all companies will do this successfully, but the companies mentioned
> will.

I'm not sure why you're going off on me. I explicitly said that Microsoft is
likely to remain in business and _making money_ for a very long time. In case
it isn't obvious, _making money_ and _successful_ are the same thing. A
company can make money serving niche markets, and many do.

> the fundamentals of each business

Microsoft's top product by both revenue and profit is Windows. Windows has a
leading market share on only a single class of device (desktops and laptops),
and that market itself has been consistently shrinking in each of the last
several years (2013:
[http://b-i.forbesimg.com/anthonykosner/files/2013/04/ChartOf...](http://b-i.forbesimg.com/anthonykosner/files/2013/04/ChartOfTheDay_1037_Global_PC_Market_in_Q1_2013_n.jpg)
2014: [http://www.engadget.com/2014/10/08/pc-market-
share-q3-2014/](http://www.engadget.com/2014/10/08/pc-market-share-q3-2014/)
2015:
[http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3090817](http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3090817)).
Forecasts are for continued shrinkage of that market. I don't think it's fair
or prudent to ignore those fundamentals, as they clearly are central to
Microsoft's ability to make money. Azure may be doing well and may even grow
into a strong #2 in its space, but it's still less than 10% the size of the
market leader and it generated well under a billion dollars of _revenue_ last
year
([http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2015/04/15/sizing-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2015/04/15/sizing-
microsoft-azure-and-amazon-aws-revenue/)), accounting for less than 1%
([http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AMSFT&fstype=ii&ei=R...](http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AMSFT&fstype=ii&ei=RfsbVsGfNMLCiQLJt4LIBQ))
of the company's total turnover. It's difficult to know if it was profitable,
but it hardly matters; the operation is barely even material to the company as
a whole. Azure would need to double in size 4 more times to account for 10% of
Microsoft's revenue.

Again: I didn't say Microsoft is going to go out of business tomorrow. Or next
year or even in 2025. But you should acknowledge that a backward-looking view
of the company is risky, and that an objective forward-looking assessment of
its business is less rosy than you would make it out to be. At best, the
company will be much less dominant than it was in the 90s.

> I mean to suggest that these companies are in trouble because of OSS such as
> MongoDB

I didn't. As I said, there's a lot of stupidity here. There probably are some
small e-commerce and ad companies using Mongo that should be using Postgres or
MySQL or Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server, but I don't know that those companies
would have gone into business at all if they had to pay an enterprise software
vendor for database licenses. I agree that the impact of MongoDB on the named
companies' bottom lines has been negligible, and that no evidence of such
impact has been offered.

The author and many of the comments here have strayed well into hyperbole,
probably fueled in part by ignorance and in part by schadenfreude and glee at
seeing some poorly-managed companies in mature markets struggling to remain
successful (HP is, after all, the poster child for mismanagement in this
space). I don't believe I've made the same error. If you think I have, please
provide supporting evidence, as I have provided for my position.

------
tw04
The irony of this is that all of the "cloud providers" still buy gear from
traditional IT vendors like Dell, EMC, HP, and Cisco for their own internal
corporate IT. It's the dirty little secret that somehow always gets overlooked
when everyone is espousing how we no longer need infrastructure when it can
all just "Live in the cloud".

~~~
payne92
Uh, no. For one example, see:
[http://www.opencompute.org/](http://www.opencompute.org/)

~~~
tw04
And that's proof of what? Opencompute is for building out their clouds, not
their internal IT.

~~~
payne92
You may be confusing OpenStack with Opencompute. Opencompute is a set of
_hardware_ designs for high-scale data centers that came out of Facebook. See:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Compute_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Compute_Project)

------
devit
The problem of these companies is that they sell highly overpriced hardware
that is in the best case sold because the consumer really wants support and
risk avoidance, in the middle case because of vendor lock-in and in the worst
case because of direct or indirect corruption.

Obviously this is not economically efficient, and thus eventually the scheme
has to unravel.

~~~
creshal
Overpriced, really? Dell sells desktop boxes sufficient for office work with
three years on-site support for under 400€, and fast servers for under 1000€
kitted out.

If that's overpriced I really need to talk to your hardware supplier.

(Of course, they all have high-end products, but the breadth of the offerings
is usually high enough that they're always an option. They're not stupid.)

~~~
devit
Indeed, this is not true for a substantial portion of Dell's products.

------
jb613
The fact that Cobol is still alive and kicking illustrates that once in place,
large systems are hard to replace. Costs and budgets matter too.

EDIT: why did this get downvoted - am I factually incorrect or you simply
disagree and want an echo-chamber?

------
damian2000
It could take a while yet before all companies big and small start using the
cloud to its full potential though ... in my experience people in management
are usually against it, citing data security issues.

~~~
iheartmemcache
You'd be surprised. I've contracted for the some 3 letter federal agencies and
they're alright with certain material being hosted in the cloud. (1) We didn't
use AWS but they were fine with standard RSA keys. MS/IBM realizes the
discomfort management has though, and addresses it with "partial
virtualization" solutions.

1: [https://aws.amazon.com/federal/](https://aws.amazon.com/federal/)

~~~
damian2000
Part of it is being outside the US as well- there is a reluctance to keep
sensitive data on servers owned by a foreign company. Attitudes are changing
though ... MS and Amazon for example have a really good presence in Australia
these days.

------
ausjke
This is a reasonable forecast, those big-irons will not go away soon, and they
will be needed for a long while, it's just the booming age for them are indeed
numbered.

While reading this I was thinking, where does Apple fit? Does it have any big
plan for enterprise at all?

------
vinceyuan
> _They couldn’t use servers from Dell and HP and IBM._

Does Amazon buy servers from Dell, HP or IBM?

------
rtets
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943

"Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality within ten years."

Alex Lewyt, president of Lewyt vacuum company, 1955

"Two years from now, spam will be solved."

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, 2004

------
a3voices
Reminds me of when Peter Thiel called them the "Technology Rust Belt" in a
talk.

