Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President • Hacker News Board

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#51

Post by echelon » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 4:10 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #27

echelon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That this could happen in any organization is surprising. That it happened in IBM is downright shocking. How do you fail an email migration and not have email for your employees? How do you let this affect billing and invoices? Why haven't they at least set up something temporary?

Why haven't they at least set up something temporary? Yes, just spin up e-mail addresses for 400,000 people in 177 countries. No problem. Just run it on a Raspberry Pi in the basement.

Pay Google or Microsoft to do it for you.

Focus on the core business competencies, of which email is clearly not one.

Edit since I can't reply: An extended email outage isn't a good look either. If IBM can't run their own critical systems, why trust them with yours? I personally think making the strategic decision to outsource demonstrates the ability and desire to find timely solutions.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#52

Post by simcop2387 » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 4:10 PM UTC

na85 wrote: post #41

paiute wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect IBM will be an Irish or similar company soon.

What's an Irish company, in this context?

I believe they're referring to this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland_as_a_tax_haven

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#53

Post by momothereal » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 4:10 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #48

momothereal wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By far the biggest software fuckup in Canada's history.

however, the therac-25 killed more people

Not trying to downplay that one either, but Pheonix put thousands of people in major financial risk and/or ruin, and at least 1 suicide was attributed to it.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#54

Post by avereveard » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

ComputerGuru wrote: post #34

avereveard wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM portfolio isn't targeted to consumers like Apple's or other companies, even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name. The only consumer facing product they had for the longest time were cash registers, and those aren't particularly hip as to live in consumer imagination Edit: in today episode, hacker news forget they're a niche cohort.

> even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name IBM was synonymous with PC for quite some time.

At a time when pc weren't household items, that came about quite later

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#55

Post by avereveard » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

excitom wrote: post #47

avereveard wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM portfolio isn't targeted to consumers like Apple's or other companies, even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name. The only consumer facing product they had for the longest time were cash registers, and those aren't particularly hip as to live in consumer imagination Edit: in today episode, hacker news forget they're a niche cohort.

The IBM Selectric typewriter was ubiquitous in offices everywhere, and IBM copiers and printers were quite prevalent.

in offices

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#56

Post by josipt » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

osipov wrote: post #23

echelon wrote: post #2

I'd really like to see IBMers talk about the past, present, and future of the company. It looks pretty pale to me. Back in the Thinkpad era, IBM had a lot of cool stuff going on. But now it seems like a shadow. Watson and IBM cloud look like flops. The email fiasco is weird and should never have happened. What did buying Red Hat accomplish? As an outsider, it doesn't seem to have infused any new ideas, and the change…

ex-IBMer here. I rode this from 2001 until 2016 when it became clear that breaking up the company (as they recently did) would become the only sensible path forward. While many poor decisions were made inside of the company, I ultimately blame Wall Street for IBM's downfall. Remember that back in 2011, Palmisano finished strong with IBM's Watson winning Jeopardy, IBM Software delivering consistent >80% profit margins…

Wall Street? Couldn't raise capital? Maybe IBM could have used some of the $110 billion dollars they spent on buying back shares to, I don't know, build a real business? IBM could potentially have built what is now AWS but what did they do instead? Share buybacks. What do they have to show for that?

IBM has been essentially a financial engineering machine for many years, with their ridiculous 5-year EPS targets and all the rest of it. While I was there they even removed plants, copiers, coffee machines, televisions, pads, pencils, pens and everything else in sight to "save" money.

The "leadership" of IBM drove the company in to the ground, period.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#57

Post by peytoncasper » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

Cloud is the new mainframe. And IBM Cloud is terrible in comparison.

All you ever hear about is how challenging Kubernetes is to manage. IBM invested in self managed Kubernetes essentially while everyone else built SaaS Kubernetes Engine’s.

IBM feels like a collection of revenue lines that hasn’t really tapped into any new streams lately.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#58

Post by xadhominemx » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

osipov wrote: post #23

echelon wrote: post #2

I'd really like to see IBMers talk about the past, present, and future of the company. It looks pretty pale to me. Back in the Thinkpad era, IBM had a lot of cool stuff going on. But now it seems like a shadow. Watson and IBM cloud look like flops. The email fiasco is weird and should never have happened. What did buying Red Hat accomplish? As an outsider, it doesn't seem to have infused any new ideas, and the change…

ex-IBMer here. I rode this from 2001 until 2016 when it became clear that breaking up the company (as they recently did) would become the only sensible path forward. While many poor decisions were made inside of the company, I ultimately blame Wall Street for IBM's downfall. Remember that back in 2011, Palmisano finished strong with IBM's Watson winning Jeopardy, IBM Software delivering consistent >80% profit margins…

IBM generates $15b of free cash flow per year. They did not need to raise anything from Wall Street. And the notion that Wall Street would somehow interfere with an internal succession process because they thought a brilliant tech executive was not very polished is laughable.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#59

Post by QuesnayJr » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

avereveard wrote: post #32

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #28

One of my recent revelations was when I told my teen children "... a company like IBM". To what they said "what is IBM??" They know all the large tech companies but that one was a surprise to them, they had a look at Wikipedia and said "ah yes, it was a great company in your times". Time to get some wine.

IBM portfolio isn't targeted to consumers like Apple's or other companies, even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name. The only consumer facing product they had for the longest time were cash registers, and those aren't particularly hip as to live in consumer imagination Edit: in today episode, hacker news forget they're a niche cohort.

In IBM's heydey, everyone knew who IBM was. Even before the PC, IBM was synonymous with "computer". People knew computers were important, even if they had never seen one outside of a movie.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#60

Post by genedan » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 4:16 PM UTC

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #28

One of my recent revelations was when I told my teen children "... a company like IBM". To what they said "what is IBM??" They know all the large tech companies but that one was a surprise to them, they had a look at Wikipedia and said "ah yes, it was a great company in your times". Time to get some wine.

When I was growing up, my mother was at IBM designing software for the space shuttle, and the street next to my house was named IBM. I was named after one of their senior engineers. So the company played a big part in my childhood and was ever present in the community, and we still have lots of IBM space swag stored away in the attic, including the silver snoopy given to my mom during her time there. The stock grants paid for our education, and my mom still lives off the pension they had. The early 90s was such an optimistic time.

At some point IBM sold off the unit, vacated the office block, and the street was renamed to that of the new company that moved in. Eventually, all the shuttle workers would be laid off after the demise of the program, so it's sad to see how it all ended.