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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

#181

Post by Bombthecat »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #87
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?

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.

But it's sadly fairly normal for tech consulting companies. Worked at some, all it projects were horrible and staffed from top to bottom and management barely looked at it.

Why?

Because the money making was more important (getting projects, sending seniors and principals off to projects etc)

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#182

Post by freeone3000 »

shp0ngle wrote: post #117
pm90 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think those companies still exist, but they exist in China. 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.

And now the world's largest car manufacturer is Toyota, the biggest gaming providers are Nintendo and Sony, and Mitsubishi and Hitachi are important players in every industry. American manufacturing in the same industries are down. People seeing the growth of Japan and decline of the US were only wrong in a matter of degree.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#183

Post by Sylamore »

shadilay wrote: post #118
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…

This is exactly how I feel. I thought Jim would make IBM more like redhat but in reality redhat became more like IBM.

That really shouldn't have been a surprise to anybody, certainly no one who has been through a corporate merger before.

The aquiring company always makes promises they won't change the aquired company, the aquired company's management parrots that line and in the end, the aquired company always gets subsumed into the aquiring company.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#184

Post by 2sk21 »

thedougd wrote: post #103
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…

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.

Exactly! Palmisano was squeezing every last cent and starving the company of resources for developing the future. Even by 2008, it was clear hat cloud computing was the next big wave and yet IBM built out its own half-baked internal cloud offering before acquiring Softlayer

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#185

Post by jodrellblank »

avereveard wrote: post #171
ghaff wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1970, IBM was #5 on the Fortune 500. Now, a young kid might not have heard of them because they never saw the logo on anything or used any of their products. But I'm pretty sure any reasonably well-educated adult [ADDED: or college student/probably teen] would have heard of them just like they would have heard of most of the largest US companies.

which means nothing, jesus, are people not able to follow a thread anymore? the whole thing was an answer to this: >>>> I told my teen children "... a company like IBM". To what they said "what is IBM??" answer wouldn't have changed in the sixties, seventies, nor eighties. mayyybe in the nineties, for the short period laptop became sought after and thinkpad the peak of the form factor.

> which means nothing

??

In 1997, IBM Deep Blue beat chess Grandmaster Gary Kasparov and made international news. IBM sponsored the Olympic Games for 40 years, they sponsored the 1995 Wimbledon tennis tournament, the ATP Tour, the US Open, French Open, Australian Open tennis tournaments, the Masters golf tournament, baseball games, auto racing, college football. Dave Bowman wore an IBM logo on his spacesuit in 2001 A Space Odyssey while people argued that "HAL 9000" was based on "IBM" with the letters shifted.

"At the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia, IBM demonstrates the largest integrated information technology system ever seen by a mass audience."

"The National Hockey League, in partnership with IBM, form an alliance - NHL Interactive Cyber Enterprises - that will use new and emerging technology to promote the growth of hockey worldwide. The Professional Golf Association of America teams with IBM to present a state-of-the-art cybercast of the 78th PGA Championship which takes place in August in Louisville, Kentucky"

"IBM is the largest corporate contributor in 1996. Over the last decade, IBM has contributed more than $1.3 billion to nonprofit organizations, schools and universities - close to four million hours of volunteer time in the United States alone,"

"[1997] The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recognizes IBM for outstanding contributions in protecting the Earth's ozone layer."

"[1998] U.S. Vice President Al Gore announces Blue Pacific - the world's fastest computer - which is jointly developed by the U.S. Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM"

"[1998] The Guiness Book of Records officially recognizes IBM for setting two world records in Internet traffic on the 1998 Nagano Olympic Winter Games Web site: "The Most Popular Internet Event Ever Recorded""

I can imagine that there were people who had never heard of them, but they were an enormous company with fingers in hundreds of pies, in the news often, in all sorts of ways - business, finances, sports, environmental, education, charity, employment, investment in factories - in newspapers, magazines, talking head pieces, they were as household name as any massive company, nothing like the "do you know the manufacturer of the Playstation graphics chip???" that you're presenting them as.

[1] https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/year_1999.html

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#186

Post by 2sk21 »

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 worked in the Watson group during the time you mention - the problem that they made was to attempt to productize the original Jeopardy system. The Jeopardy system was built with the single-minded goal of winning jeopardy. It was much too heavy weight for real-world applications - it required unbelievable computing resources and simply could not be deployed in the cloud as it could only run on Power machines.

Ultimately much of the system had to be rewritten and this took years by which time, it was just another competitor in a crowded market

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#187

Post by avereveard »

jodrellblank wrote: post #185
avereveard wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which means nothing, jesus, are people not able to follow a thread anymore? the whole thing was an answer to this: >>>> I told my teen children "... a company like IBM". To what they said "what is IBM??" answer wouldn't have changed in the sixties, seventies, nor eighties. mayyybe in the nineties, for the short period laptop became sought after and thinkpad the peak of the form factor.

> which means nothing ?? In 1997, IBM Deep Blue beat chess Grandmaster Gary Kasparov and made international news. IBM sponsored the Olympic Games for 40 years, they sponsored the 1995 Wimbledon tennis tournament, the ATP Tour, the US Open, French Open, Australian Open tennis tournaments, the Masters golf tournament, baseball games, auto racing, college football. Dave Bowman wore an IBM logo on his spacesuit in 2001 A…

what I see is a lot of people thinking their bubble is relevant for the public at large, even discounting the rampant americentrism

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#188

Post by osipov »

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…

>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?

You just answered your own question. As I pointed out, leadership was "picked" by Wall Street investors. Share buybacks and financial engineering exist to keep the investors happy.

If they didn't buy back shares and invested in R&D the stock would have gone straight down instead of sideways. As I said the leadership "couldn't get the capital to fund internal engineering efforts for the _scale_ of the transformation needed to sustain IBM's success"

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#189

Post by osipov »

xadhominemx wrote: post #58
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…

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.

>IBM generates $15b of free cash flow per year.

The cash flow number obviously varied year to year.

If you think that Wall Street doesn't have a veto power in the selection of a public company's CEO you are very naive.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#190

Post by evol262 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #148
evol262 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who spent 8 years inside Red Hat, this is exactly why anecdotal "evidence" is garbage. Complaining that an engineering company is full of mostly white males (in an industry which is full of mostly white mails) is an example of nothing. Red Hat started programs to push LGBTQ+ people in 2014, women in leadership in 2017, neurodiversity acceptance in 2018, black leadership in 2018. You may think all of those…

> garbage For sensitive issues, it's hard to imagine this will lead to a constructive, curious conversation. It would be interesting, for example, if you and the GP tried to examine why you have such different experiences? Maybe you were in different places, working for different people, and saw different things? Maybe different job descriptions? The world is always much bigger than what we imagine.

This is not a "sensitive" issue, unless you consider GP's opinion "sensitive". I don't. I also don't think it would lead to a curious, constructive conversation. There is probably nothing OP could offer which would change what the experience of 8 years in RH engineering showed me. At best, it would lead to another long reply where I tried to explain what RH was actually like versus GP's impression.

It's essentially GP posting on the Debian/OpenBSD/LK ML and saying "wow, these guys are arrogant". Well, they have strong opinions, and they need to justify them. If you don't have thick skin, you should probably avoid upstream discussions. It doesn't mean you should cast aspersions on the developers or their communities/companies. Linus is an incredibly nice person, but you wouldn't think it if all you saw was his mails blasting Intel for Spectre/Meltdown. You'd have a very different opinion of the man than who he is in 99% of interactions, and commenting about it on HN would be likely to get a reply similar to mine.

GP only had "anecdotal" experience with Red Hat versus actually working inside the company. When I started, I was worried that it would be different "behind the curtain". It was not. The other who mentioned junior engineers speaking up if they disagreed was spot on.

In 201x (2015? 2017? I dunno), RH changed their pay structure from being bimonthly to biweekly in the US to align with the rest of the world. There were hundreds of replies to the entire company debating whether it was better to pay us once a month and manage your money better, or once a week to be more consistent, or...

That's what the company was. It was not by the time I left. Granted, when I started, RH HQ was still on a college campus. If all you ever read was upstream mailing lists, you'd get the feeling that everyone (Linux, Theo [not that he works for RH, obviously], Lennart, whomever) other than Dan Walsh was arrogant assholes. That's not representative of who they actually are.

Painting Red Hat with a broad brush from incidental interactions versus the perspective of someone who spent nearly a decade there is dramatically different. Did it have problems? Sure. But none of the ones GP mentioned. The world is much bigger than what GP imagined from his anecdotal experience.

RH was a unicorn, and it's gone. LinkedIn last summer was essentially rats fleeing a sinking ship. IBM spent $35B on a company with no actual assets (a few patents) other than smart, passionate people. They would have had to really try to screw it up. And they did. I don't honestly know if there will be another RH in the future, but I'm hoping there will be.

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