81–90 of 223 posts
IBM has long been struggling. They could release a press release saying they’re pausing hiring because businesses are underperforming. Or they could play the news cycle and say it’s because of how awesome their “AI” is. Interpret that as you wish.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have no idea what you are talking about. IBM does more cutting edge research than the entire HN bubble combined. Hard research like materials science and semiconductors. Consulting is less than a third of their revenue and regardless of how you feel about consulting, it seems kind of idiotic to claim that this "barely makes sense at all at this point". Are the only companies that make sense the ones that work on…
I think the true thing is that IBM has ceased to be a leader in Computer Science. They used to be! But they gave that up long ago, and have resorted to various publicity stunts (e.g., remember Jeopardy?). But sure, they may be a leader in materials and semiconductors (though honestly I have no idea, that's not my space).
They could have built it over time to offer real assistance to knowledge workers with a real revenue stream.
But that would have required vision and foresight.
My experience is that there are lots of BS consulting jobs where I would wonder “what do these 10 people do?” This included lots of offshoring companies, like IBM, that seemed more about filling out whatever the budget sheet given to them than actually making software or even any evidence of software (commits, issues, etc). I expect that there are firms out there right now using ChatGPT to produce the facade of work…
After getting ChatGPT to write some code for me, this could happen again except with AI instead of an outsourced team.
So far, it understands the requirements better and writes pretty good code on average. Its unit tests are pretty good too. It always requires some fixes and integration, of course.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the true thing is that IBM has ceased to be a leader in Computer Science. They used to be! But they gave that up long ago, and have resorted to various publicity stunts (e.g., remember Jeopardy?). But sure, they may be a leader in materials and semiconductors (though honestly I have no idea, that's not my space).
People mock them for that Jeopardy thing, but that would have been the perfect first move to offering something like Watson as a service. They could have built it over time to offer real assistance to knowledge workers with a real revenue stream. But that would have required vision and foresight.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/technology/what-happened-...
This is just using the AI hype as cover to not get slammed by the markets. If they came out and said "We are pausing hiring..." the markets would rightly be like "Man they are screwed..." Expect to see more of this from zombie companies in the future, as long as they spend $20/mo on a ChatGPT subscription somewhere they are probably not violating SEC disclosures either.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the true thing is that IBM has ceased to be a leader in Computer Science. They used to be! But they gave that up long ago, and have resorted to various publicity stunts (e.g., remember Jeopardy?). But sure, they may be a leader in materials and semiconductors (though honestly I have no idea, that's not my space).
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IBM as a company barely makes sense at all at this point. They are a very large and a former tech company that mostly coasts along on doing expensive consulting projects around me-too clones of things that other people have invented just so they can still pretend to be a tech company. So you can do things with AI, cloud, and databases with them. But they aren't really leaders in any of that for a long time. And havin…
You have no idea what you are talking about. IBM does more cutting edge research than the entire HN bubble combined. Hard research like materials science and semiconductors. Consulting is less than a third of their revenue and regardless of how you feel about consulting, it seems kind of idiotic to claim that this "barely makes sense at all at this point". Are the only companies that make sense the ones that work on…
IBM as a company barely makes sense at all at this point. They are a very large and a former tech company that mostly coasts along on doing expensive consulting projects around me-too clones of things that other people have invented just so they can still pretend to be a tech company. So you can do things with AI, cloud, and databases with them. But they aren't really leaders in any of that for a long time. And havin…
You have no idea what you are talking about. IBM does more cutting edge research than the entire HN bubble combined. Hard research like materials science and semiconductors. Consulting is less than a third of their revenue and regardless of how you feel about consulting, it seems kind of idiotic to claim that this "barely makes sense at all at this point". Are the only companies that make sense the ones that work on…
IBM is replacing humans, who can identify an exceptional events which weren't anticipated by planners, with AI, which only regurgitates past training data.
I'm sort of imagining IBM human resources department now as some hellish mashup of Ionesco, Nietzsche and Ballard (with a piquant dollop of THX 1138 to provide that absurdist, institutionalized aroma IBM seemed to love.)
At least the TVA was smart enough to recruit biological entities to run it's bureaucracy.