71–80 of 158 posts
So, not working with any insider knowledge (I work for Red Hat, but reading the news like everyone else), but the other news is that Jim Whitehurst is going to be the IBM President. Hopefully a big push in keeping Red Hat's culture relevant and influencing IBM to transform.
This is SOP for borgifying acquihires. IBM isn't capable of operating in a cohesive way. Shuffling the org chart won't change that.
Translation?
Can we derive anything meaningful from the fact that this Hacker News item almost gets no response and just a few comments?
HN is SV centric where IBM is an East coast tech company. HN is startup centric where IBM is over 100 years old. HN is very B2C centric where IBM is almost exclusively B2B. HN doesn’t deal too much with enterprise companies.
Another Indian-born tech CEO? It's incredible. IBM joins Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Nokia, and Harman in this regard. Also, MasterCard and PepsiCo (until 2018). I wonder how much it's a cultural thing.
This is a biased, but honest observation that I'd like to share. I've been working for a big corp for about 5 years now. I was born in a SE Asian country and came to the US for college. I have worked with a lot of India-born people. As a fellow foreigner and as an Asian, I can tell that more often than not Indian people are bolder and more aggressive in asking for what they want (e.g., one of my Indian colleague aske…
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ALSO. the people you are describing are (I'm guessing) immigrants. Meaning they are a subset of people from their home country with the internal initiative, drive, and resources to move halfway around the world and make their way in a culture besides the one they grew up in
This is under appreciated. I spent significant time living and working in China and it’s HARD. I came back to the US with a MUCH deeper respect for any immigrants I work with. Everything is much more confusing and frustrating.
There's definitely a culture shock when you first move here and are figuring stuff out - How do you order food at a subway or a chipotle? (not a big deal anymore given the explosion of these restaurants in India in the last few years). Why is called Cilantro and not Corinander? How do I get a phone when I don't have any credit history at all? What is a turn-pike?
I was expecting to see the Watson logo
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This is under appreciated. I spent significant time living and working in China and it’s HARD. I came back to the US with a MUCH deeper respect for any immigrants I work with. Everything is much more confusing and frustrating.
The language / the cultural barrier isn't as high as it is for an American living in China though. I've grown up speaking English and watching a lot of American / British movies and TV, reading a lot of english literature. I assume this is not the case for most Americans with Chinese culture. There's definitely a culture shock when you first move here and are figuring stuff out - How do you order food at a subway or…
Is IBM even relevant anymore or are they simply another McKinsey type consulting firm Who happens to sell mainframes to banks?
I continue to be puzzled by the derision that companies on this site get just because they do regular business.
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> Satya wasn't an engineer at microsoft. This is true, strictly speaking. But (also strictly speaking) he was an engineer > Nadella attended the Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet[7] before receiving a bachelor's in electrical engineering[8] from the Manipal Institute of Technology (then part of Mangalore University) in Karnataka in 1988.[9][10] Nadella subsequently traveled to the U.S. to study for an M.S. in compute…
Nadella was a Program Manager at Microsoft.
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Also couldn't they basically sit on their rear and collect on mainframe contracts from now until the end of time?
No. There's immense pressure on the mainframe market; there's a constant drumbeat of mainframe-killer tech that's definitely better/faster/stronger (and, on rare occasions, is...at least for some narrowly defined workload). IBM has to work very hard keep mainframes competitive technology, and even harder at sales/marketing to fend off the alternatives.
In the early 90's, there were efforts by customers to get rid of their mainframes which put IBM on the ropes then, until Lou Gerstner took over as CEO and stabilized the business. It's not like these transaction workloads can be easily ported elsewhere since some of them go back as far as the early 1970's. Those customers able to ditch their mainframes did so a while back. The rest of these systems will remain due to risks and costs of migrating to a suitable alternative. It's not a huge revenue stream for IBM, but a very profitable one.