Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Amazon Prime Day - Dog Days, PC sales are up First Time since 2012

Amazon's Prime Day starts with a picture of a Dog.

The Amazon Prime Day 2018 got off to a rough start as the sudden rush of online shoppers evidently overwhelmed the servers and shoppers were greeted with pictures of dogs rather than what the products the links promised.  You have probably seen a 404 error page before on the internet when a page you were looking cannot be found.  Amazon presents you with a picture of a dog when you encounter a 404 error on their servers.


I first heard about the issues from an alert client who called and told me about it.  He was online to buy some items we found over the weekend for his system.


The hellish problems continued for hours frustrating many shoppers who have little patience with internet issues to start with.  To exacerbate things, the absence initially of any problems by Amazon contributed to customer anxiety.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is actually the largest Cloud Provider.  If you are using a Cloud service such as any accounting services (Yardi), health care, or any other hosted internet service, there is a good chance that it is actually being hosted on a server running under AWS.  However, Prime Day woes appeared to be restricted to problems caused by code in the Amazon Store.


As of 3rd Quarter 2017 the 7 largest cloud providers were;

7.  SAP SE - $1.02 billion
6.  Oracle - $1.19 billion
5.  Alphabet (Google) - $1.8 billion
4.  Salesforce - $2.2 billion
3.  IBM - $3.5 billion
2.  Amazon - 3.66 billion
1.  Microsoft - $6.76 billion

The rankings are fluid and change yearly.  In 2015 AWS was number 1.  So far in 2018, Microsoft remains number 1, followed by AWS, Salesforce, IBM and then Google.


PC Sales are up for the first time since 2012

PC sales are posting the first growth in shipments since 2012.  The experts are pegging this growth on demand for desktops by businesses and people looking for high-performance gaming PCs.

What the experts are missing in this equation is Intel Generation 8 processors that offer truly outstanding increases in processing capability.

The Intel Core i3 has gone from 2 cores to 4 cores and now offer an unlocked K version for performance seekers.

The Core i5 and Core i7 processors have both been increased from 4 to 6 cores.

The improved processors combined with the new supporting chipsets are on a new plateau from the previous offerings.

In addition, SSDs have come down in price and it is becoming increasingly affordable to offer an M2 slot 128/256 GB to host the OS for lightning fast startup.



Driving Force offers a full line of Gen 8 workstations to fit any need.  Whether you are looking at the most economical or a powerful platform to last for years to come, any of these will beat your current system.

For pricing please click on image below.  Thanks!










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