Arm succumbs to Californification

Poor old Arm.

Once respected across the world for designing processor cores which the world wanted to use and developing the physical IP to implement them, the company is succumbing to Californification.

What would a bunch of engineers designing processor cores want with a Californian ‘analytics’ company?

According to Arm it will give its customers the power ‘to quickly, securely and sustainably create actionable insights from IoT, enterprise and third-party data.’

Arm has just paid $600 million to gain this capability. The company it has bought was backed by SBI (previously called Softbank Investments) which is a former subsidiary of Arm’s owner Softbank.

The justification is the pursuit of IoT – but what is IoT but cheapo networking? And, with everyone and their dog piling into IoT, commoditisation is inevitable.

The Arm style has changed dramatically – instead of technical announcements we now get jargon-ridden blogs.

Meanwhile its new owner sells chunks of Arm to Chinese investors and to its investment fund and talks of IPO-ing it.

Once a company infused with good, down-to-earth, Derbyshire common sense led by inspired engineering, Arm is now enmeshed in a financial engineering process while mesmerised by the West Coast bollox tendency.

God help it.