Robert Cringley has a recent book about the decline of IBM - http://www.cringely.com/2014/06/04/decline-fall-ibm/ - I found it pretty interesting. His thesis is that IBM's management has consistently goosed short-term profits by making cuts that hurt it long term. It off-shored technical work, under-invested in quality, tooling and automation, laid off older more experienced workers, etc. I don't have any first hand of experience of IBM, so I cannot vouch for how true Cringley's story is.
Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
21–30 of 80 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
#22I've been working at IBM for a couple of years now, started as a grad. What you must be referring to is the stock price, which has dropped from 200 dollars a couple of years ago to like 120 these days. I can't claim to understand this company, I think very few people can. There are 300,000 employees and more teams/products/departments than you can imagine. It's absolutely insane. However, what I can say is the follow…
Watson is quite impressive from the outside atleast. It's sort of the opposite of the Palantir approach to unstructured data; which is to say Watson processes and outputs the conclusions as opposed to aiding humans. Is that getting any traction?
Re: Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
#23I've been working at IBM for a couple of years now, started as a grad. What you must be referring to is the stock price, which has dropped from 200 dollars a couple of years ago to like 120 these days. I can't claim to understand this company, I think very few people can. There are 300,000 employees and more teams/products/departments than you can imagine. It's absolutely insane. However, what I can say is the follow…
> IBM has existed for like 100+ years now
In its 105th year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing-Tabulating-Recording...
IBM still does punched card processing for the census, right?
Re: Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
#24From 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…
> Why use their unknown proprietary cloud stuff
BlueMix is a branded version of Cloud Foundry, which is an opensource product owned and managed by an independent foundation.
Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, another company that works on Cloud Foundry.
Re: Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
#25I've been working at IBM for a couple of years now, started as a grad. What you must be referring to is the stock price, which has dropped from 200 dollars a couple of years ago to like 120 these days. I can't claim to understand this company, I think very few people can. There are 300,000 employees and more teams/products/departments than you can imagine. It's absolutely insane. However, what I can say is the follow…
IBMers had these nice quote about sun never down on IBM's wealth (a paraphrase). Also the story of the blind elephant caretaker.
I wish IBM not to die and manage to turn pressure into strength to develop new hardware and new ideas (I found the business software pretty .. lacking). It's one of the oldest companies in operations. And I'm a passeist.
Re: Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
#26IBM is suffering the fate of OPEC countries, except with technology. IBM wasn't diversified. (Sure, IBM has lots of products, but it usually sold licenses to all these products in large bundles, rarely did anyone buy just DB2, rather, agreements purchased entire ecosystem of IBM software/hardware). IBM was built on a single golden goose "massive multi-million dollar agreements with Fortune 500 CTO's for thousands of…
> faster than it can generate new revenue with Watson
Re: Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
#27From 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?
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Re: Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
#28I've been working at IBM for a couple of years now, started as a grad. What you must be referring to is the stock price, which has dropped from 200 dollars a couple of years ago to like 120 these days. I can't claim to understand this company, I think very few people can. There are 300,000 employees and more teams/products/departments than you can imagine. It's absolutely insane. However, what I can say is the follow…
Watson is quite impressive from the outside atleast. It's sort of the opposite of the Palantir approach to unstructured data; which is to say Watson processes and outputs the conclusions as opposed to aiding humans. Is that getting any traction?
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Re: Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
#29IBM is suffering the fate of OPEC countries, except with technology. IBM wasn't diversified. (Sure, IBM has lots of products, but it usually sold licenses to all these products in large bundles, rarely did anyone buy just DB2, rather, agreements purchased entire ecosystem of IBM software/hardware). IBM was built on a single golden goose "massive multi-million dollar agreements with Fortune 500 CTO's for thousands of…
> faster than it can generate new revenue with Watson I evaluated the Watson public APIs a little while (a year?) ago, and found them close to useless, yet the amount of hype behind the brand is intense. I wonder what the disconnect is.
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Re: Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
#30IBM has to change their business plan and focus on new technology.
When the IBM PC was made it started the PC Era that became the Post-Mainframe era. When mobile devices took off it became the Post-PC era and IBM had to sell its PC and Server lines and focus on services.
Now even if it is the Post-PC era PCs are still being used. IBM had to get rid of OS/2 and migrate to GNU/Linux.
Right now it is also the Cloud-Era and IBM has to work on Cloud technology.
When a company shifts technology like that it takes a while to find a way to turn a profit.
Apple went to the mobile technology market and it took off like a rocket. IBM had the Simon Smart Phone in the 1990s but couldn't market it.
IBM has a lot of technical debt in maintaining Mainframes and Minicomputers that are still in use. The Lotus products also are outdated and they tried to use OpenOffice.Org to make Lotus Symphony and it didn't take off.
IBM Opened up its Power technology: http://openpowerfoundation.org/
A lot of things have happened to technology that IBM suffered from losing money because the technology became outdated. IBM has to invent new technology to replace it.
IBM is focusing on services and the cloud right now. Sort of moving away from hardware because it is hard to earn money from hardware and moving to software and services instead.
Everything I used to know about IBM has changed, IBM has to reinvent themselves. The technology and markets have changed and IBM has to adapt.