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Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

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Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#101

Post by agumonkey »

deckard1 wrote: post #93
trimbo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name I'm curious to see data on this. My guess is that in the early to mid 80s, IBM had to have been the top consumer technology brand. At least in knowledge of the brand, even if they didn't own one. Their Charlie Chaplin ads were everywhere, then they spent an enormous amount of money marketing PCjr[1]. [1] - "As part of $32.5 million in advertising for the…

my impression of the mid '90s was that IBM also spent a boatload on OS/2 Warp marketing as well. But by that time everyone was on Windows and wanted Windows95. The ads for Warp were everywhere, in print and on TV. IBM seemed to be reliving the same mistakes they made with the PS/2 and micro channel arch.

I can't picture IBM being consumer.. they were too deep and too big. They didn't speak mainstream .. Jobs had some stuff to sell (aesthetics, art, culture) .. IBM had 'enterprise grade'.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#102

Post by jollybean »

throwawaygal7 wrote: post #79
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…

I was an intern at IBM from 2010-2015, and then an full time engineer for a short while before moving on. I agree completely that the change in leadership marked an inability to really bring WATSON to market, and some other products too. While I was an intern, I sat next to ExtremeBlue interns and team members working on Watson. The technology was awesome and they were working like mad. Sleeping under the desk. By 20…

"I agree completely that the change in leadership marked an inability to really bring WATSON to market, and some other products too."

Watson for all it's academic glory, was kind of vapourware as a product.

It just never really did anything materially useful. They did a lot of hospital trials that fizzled. Way, way over-promised.

A little bit along the lines of ElementAI - it's hard to commercialized AI directly.

Google et. al. do it right by incrementally improving things like translation, voice recognition ... it's making waves within academia for it's quality, but it's something consumers are hardly aware of.

Since IBM is not a consumer company, there's only so much sugar and hype that Watson can provide (winning Jeopardy was a brilliant thing) before the rubber has to hit the rode.

I'm not so sure if it's fair to blame a new leader for that one ... because I'm not sure what a realistic business application for Watson would be. (Maybe there are hard and real products, but they're probably going to be very context specific etc..)

Building great tech is hard enough, then building great products on top of that - just as hard. Doing it within a massive multinational that makes it's money from grifting governments and megacorps into paying for really expensive services probably just is not going to work.

MS, Google, FB ... they have the operational fidelity and product line to leverage AI internally, IBM, not so much.

I don't know what the future of IBM looks like aside from just being another Accenture.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#103

Post by thedougd »

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…

Sam's EPS target was the singular focus during that time. Executive management squeezed everything for the last penny during that period, IMO setting the path to failure.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#104

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

kingsuper20 wrote: post #14
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…

>Back in the Thinkpad era, IBM had a lot of cool stuff going on. But now it seems like a shadow. I remember their stuff from the pre-Thinkpad era. Quite a company. Working for both a large competitor and for a small company that was trying to sell to them they seemed clumsy but still had an amazing portfolio. My guess is that they just need to merge/break-up/reconfigure into oblivion. Just another AT&T/HP/ITT/Polaroi…

Having worked at one of those that also did business with IBM, I felt there was an ethos I observed in the upper ranks that is hard to describe. It was like they felt they were better than others, had large egos about their brand and had a certain stuffiness to them where they knew what was right because it was them. Like a business book/MBA club of sorts. Kinda hard to describe it.

Anyhow I wonder if this better-than-thou, stuffy corporate attitude leads itself to internal re-org cycles where it results in no identity and no central vision, just internal battles.

It seems like other similar size large companies, like Apple, can be successful so maybe their leadership doesn't show these character traits?

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#105

Post by jhickok »

peytoncasper wrote: post #57

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.

For what it's worth IBM has transitioned to OpenShift and it is a very successful product line. I think there are a lot of problems with marrying OpenShift with IBM's other products but OpenShift on IBM Cloud is pretty good.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#106

Post by jhickok »

throwaway57754 wrote: post #12
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…

IBM bought Red Hat for OpenShift. IBM buying Red Hat was supposed to propel OpenShift and Red Hats portfolio into the C-suite connections IBM had. Instead, it seems IBM has force marched Red Hat to focus all their energies on OpenShift at the expense of their larger portfolio. OpenShift probably isn't performing as well as IBM expected, and even with 4 it still carries the "OpenShift is not Kubernetes" vibe. IBM also…

Containerizing IBM's software and forcing it all on OpenShift is such a weird move to me. When you force your customers to become Kubernetes admins when all they really want is some other solution I think you have a drastically smaller target.

I think a lot of Red Hatters are tired of having the IBM sales force show up in their OpenShift accounts asking about upgrading them to Cloud Paks.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#107

Post by dvh »

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.

The "I" in FAANG stands for IBM

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#108

Post by cmxch »

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.

> cash registers

Don't you mean NCR, even in light of what IBM did for cash registers?

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#110

Post by pm90 »

genedan wrote: post #60
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…

Thanks for sharing your story.

I wonder if the children of FAANG employees would feel similar to what you felt. I suspect that may not be the case, since most companies don't really make such long term investments anymore.

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