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

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#81

Post by throwawaygal7 » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

josipt wrote: post #56

osipov wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Agree completely , the leadership was selling the farm piece by piece.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#82

Post by spitfire » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

htrp wrote: post #19

datahead wrote: post #6

I like Whitehurst and have had the chance to meet him a few times. If you want to understand his ethos check out "The Open Organization". It details his transition from Delta to Red Hat and the transformation of his leadership style being around a lot of smart engineers and team players ready to constructively challenge each other. Good read for anyone interested in building inclusive company culture in tech. Honestl…

In every acquisition the Acquirer imposes on the Acquiree..... In this case, I'd bet that it's Arvind Krishna pulling people out of IBM Cloud (his old division) to run the rest of "big blue" And yes, IBM will basically bleed talent from Red Hat for the next 3 years until RHEL is a pale shadow of its former self.

Exception to this rule was NeXT purchasing Apple for negative $400 million.

Most of the NeXT senior staff (jabs, avi, etc) Went on to take over roles at Apple. They also brought in all the NeXT technology and threw out Apples' Nextstep/Openstep->Mac OSX

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#83

Post by failwhaleshark » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 4:37 PM UTC

Agnostic of actual political nonsense, an email scandal finally gets someone in leadership. That's the unluckiest SOB ever.

PS: After an experimental physics colloquia on their campus up the hill, IBM Almaden offered me a paid dark matter RA job when I was 15. It didn't happen thanks to sabotaging parents. Also, a computer scientist-programmer lady from IBM volunteered her time at my high-school which was really cool.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#84

Post by markus_zhang » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 4:37 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #31

MangoCoffee wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

probably not. IBM haven't been that much relevant in tech for years. they pivot to the cut throat consulting services while kind of abandoned what IBM used to be. a tech leader. Microsoft was like IBM after Bill Gates. Not a tech leader for many years until Microsoft pivot to Cloud computing and software as services.

google "IBM phoenix payroll canada" for a fine example of what has gone wrong. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=ibm+pho...

How did they get so wrong...

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#85

Post by tims33 » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 4:39 PM UTC

It won't be long until IBM starts the write-downs of the goodwill from the RH acquisition.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#86

Post by mkr-hn » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

chakkepolja wrote: post #74

TheDong wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> leadership style being around a lot of smart engineers [...] building inclusive company culture in tech. Red Hat was certainly an open company. I don't know if "inclusive" is the right word though. "Inclusive" has strong connotations now of people being welcoming, especially of those that are different. This is largely anecdotal, but my interactions with Red Hat and external observations can better be summed up as…

> white males This is HN not twitter.

Dismissing a whole comment to focus on two out of context words is very much like Twitter. I see several excellent comments responding to the best read of it. And then there's your comment.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#87

Post by mattbrewsbytes » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #16

NortySpock wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/30/ibm_email_outage/

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?

This is on point.

If their main revenue is doing consulting for businesses and their own IT projects have horrible failures why would you pick them?

Its like hearing your plumber has leaking and broken pipes in their house.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#88

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

avereveard wrote: post #54

ComputerGuru wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

[deleted]

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#89

Post by tyingq » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 4:50 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.

Spinning up emails for just the sales people would probably be worth whatever the short term cost was.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#90

Post by Spooky23 » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 4:51 PM UTC

TheDong wrote: post #21

datahead wrote: post #6

I like Whitehurst and have had the chance to meet him a few times. If you want to understand his ethos check out "The Open Organization". It details his transition from Delta to Red Hat and the transformation of his leadership style being around a lot of smart engineers and team players ready to constructively challenge each other. Good read for anyone interested in building inclusive company culture in tech. Honestl…

> leadership style being around a lot of smart engineers [...] building inclusive company culture in tech. Red Hat was certainly an open company. I don't know if "inclusive" is the right word though. "Inclusive" has strong connotations now of people being welcoming, especially of those that are different. This is largely anecdotal, but my interactions with Red Hat and external observations can better be summed up as…

If you’re the type of person who cares about and engages in internal mailing list drama, why not keep it there?