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Early redhatter here. I will always have mixed feelings about Jim. On the one hand, I fully respect him, what he does, and how he does it. I think he was a good choice for redhat at the time. However, his start also coincided with then end of the really fun times.
Early redhatter here. I will always have mixed feelings about Jim. On the one hand, I fully respect him, what he does, and how he does it. I think he was a good choice for redhat at the time. However, his start also coincided with then end of the really fun times.
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.
"How're you gonna do it? You're gonna PS/2 it!"
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
In fact, Netflix is only there nowadays to avoid the acronym from becoming offensive.
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.
Yes, I know them from computing history lectures, and I liked their ThinkPads (but they sold that to Lenovo when I was in high school).
I have only directly interacted with IBM product once, and that was Lotus Notes in one corporation I worked as a tech support in university years. And it was horrible.
At university, I thought of IBM as "they do things that are invisible but probably important?", but now I guess they don't do even that.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I might be wrong though. I just see the growth of China and decline of the US, and I cannot stop feeling like those two are connected. But what do I know. People were afraid about Japan before.
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…
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.
That being said, I'm not sure why I would leverage OpenShift on IBM Cloud when I can get practically the same thing from the other providers with a stronger ecosystem of tooling.
Which leads me back to OpenShift on-premise and I'm just not sure that is where the market is at or headed right now.
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.
Remember when IBM tech powered every popular video game console? Not long ago. I thought having POWER machines for gaming was very cool. It didn't worked out for some reason.