Company seems to be doing poorly (14 straight quarters of declining revenue) and according to markets. Would be good if someone with a grasp of how the company works could explain what's going wrong
Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
1–10 of 80 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
#2Over what time period? Like the last 2 years or longer or shorter? What specifically is the poor being asked about?
Re: Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
#3Define "doing poorly".
IBM is down 17% percent in the last 6 months. (https://www.google.com/finance?q=ibm) As far as tech stocks go, that's not crisis-mode.
As far as newsworthyness, Watson and Bluemix have been making the press rounds.
Re: Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
#4Accountants have taken over leadership roles, resulting in a corporate-wide prioritization of earnings-per-share promises over engineering and logistics.
Re: Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
#5IBM has transitioned into an enterprise services/consulting firm over the past 15 years or so. Their game plan is to get huge $$ contracts from Fortune 50 companies and government agencies, which is a long and costly process.
This kind of business is extremely hard to scale, compared to a true software or hardware company innovating and licensing/selling products. IBM does have a ton of resources behind Watson, but that's still basically an enterprise services contract sale, and not much of a cloud product.
Re: Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
#6Define "doing poorly". IBM is down 17% percent in the last 6 months. ( https://www.google.com/finance?q=ibm ) As far as tech stocks go, that's not crisis-mode. As far as newsworthyness, Watson and Bluemix have been making the press rounds.
Since its March 2013 high. Their revenues have been decreasing for 14 straight quarters
Re: Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
#7From my lowly developer point of view.
Power may be a bit quicker than Intel, but it's unfamiliar to many. Nvidia is breaking new ground, it's sexy, accessible, and cheaper.
On the software side it's a similar story. Why use their unknown proprietary cloud stuff when I can just make use of the plethora python/julia/clojure/R stuff? AWS is fancy and ever expanding, Softlayer is a PITA.
IBM biz news http://finance.yahoo.com/q/h?s=ibm
Re: Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
#8IBM has transitioned into an enterprise services/consulting firm over the past 15 years or so. Their game plan is to get huge $$ contracts from Fortune 50 companies and government agencies, which is a long and costly process. This kind of business is extremely hard to scale, compared to a true software or hardware company innovating and licensing/selling products. IBM does have a ton of resources behind Watson, but t…
Does it mean its core revenues are more stable? Are enterprise customers moving away from it?
Re: Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
#9From my lowly developer point of view. Power may be a bit quicker than Intel, but it's unfamiliar to many. Nvidia is breaking new ground, it's sexy, accessible, and cheaper. On the software side it's a similar story. Why use their unknown proprietary cloud stuff when I can just make use of the plethora python/julia/clojure/R stuff? AWS is fancy and ever expanding, Softlayer is a PITA. IBM biz news http://finance.yaho…
AWS does cater to enterprise customers, but do they have the same one point of contact style service that IBM has historically provided?
Re: Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
#10IBM has long seen itself not as a computer or electronics company but as a marketing company. Their approach to marketing is to have salesmen in branch offices selling to businesses. Long they sold business machines for routine business record keeping.
They are still trying to sell, sell something, via those branch offices to those businesses but they have run out of things to sell. And the sales culture is not good at thinking of good, new products/services to sell.