171–180 of 711 posts
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/21/business/ibm-watson-healt...
The business is being sold for an undisclosed price to Francisco Partners, a private investment firm.. Watson Health was set up as a separate business in 2015. IBM then spent more than $4 billion to acquire companies with medical data, billing records and diagnostic images on hundreds of millions of patients.
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Why?
Good question. Prediction markets [1] allow people to bet on outcomes and benefit financially if they are correct. However, many jurisdictions ban them outright claiming that they a form of gambling and challenging the unregulated nature of questions leading to misaligned incentives (“When will that building burn down?”). Yet despite these issues, the scheme can offer a neutral ground for betting against overhyped te…
I do not understand how IBM stays in business. As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique memory architecture but otherwise is well behind everyone else. What else did they do in my lifetime? They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, they took the best Laptop line and sold it to Lenovo and almost ruined it, they tried to be a front runner in ML but…
I was surprised by some companies too, until I worked outside of tech. The whole rest of the universe needs software too. Most companies are grossly incompetent to develop it themselves. Most are things that SWEs of the type which visit HN would never, ever want to work on. IBM does that adequately well. That's "services." If I need a tool built which will manage workflow at a management consulting firm, a custom too…
[0] https://newsroom.ibm.com/2021-11-03-IBM-Completes-the-Separa...
I do not understand how IBM stays in business. As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique memory architecture but otherwise is well behind everyone else. What else did they do in my lifetime? They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, they took the best Laptop line and sold it to Lenovo and almost ruined it, they tried to be a front runner in ML but…
Because people who make that fatal decision read Gartner magic quadrants.
I always answer, "Sure, we could, if you're fine with not other progress getting made towards your business objectives for 6 months."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work in a role where half of our stuff is in IBM's cloud (for decisions made before my tenure). On a day in Mid-November, we started receiving alerts from our UAT and PROD environments. Logged in, all our stuff was gone. Opened a ticket and did some digging and found in our audit logs an IBM SRE had deleted all our stuff. They then told us there was no way to recover and we'd have to rebuild from scratch. They had…
so I worked at IBM cloud, and can confirm this. They bought a cloud service, that by itself, and if left alone would been great. Soft(....something...) was the company... then IBM came and changed everything. I remember the SVP / President of ibm cloud showing up... talking 3 hours about how her son is so great and that we should 'follow' his example... after hour 3, man goes and interrupts and asks a question that w…
* Bring in Deloitte, McKenzie, or other consulting group.
* Gut the acquired company to reduce costs.
* Fold newly acquired divisions into existing mediocre division.
* Service gets run into the ground without the original people who made it great.
* Eventually the service degrades and customers leave, business line stops generating profits
* Company goes through the process again.
I do not understand how IBM stays in business. As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique memory architecture but otherwise is well behind everyone else. What else did they do in my lifetime? They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, they took the best Laptop line and sold it to Lenovo and almost ruined it, they tried to be a front runner in ML but…
I worked breifly at IBM research last century. The spent a lot of money on research (6 Billion). software, chip design and algorithms and a lot of just basic research. But when I left to go back to school "global services" a business to business consulting division was the big up and coming division. It seems that division is where IBM decided to go. Honestly they'll just sell to some big businesses so likely you'll…
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Most big tech companies got out of or significantly scaled back their blockchain business, it is solution chasing a problem. The web3 people apparently haven’t caught on yet https://petri.com/blockchain-bust-microsoft-joins-ibm-with-b...
I think secretly they are aiming for the digital currency aspect of blockchain, e.g. Bitcoin but couldn't understand how it works as MBA schools havn't mint out bitcoin graduates yet. Maybe in abother 10 years.
Genius!
I do not understand how IBM stays in business. As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique memory architecture but otherwise is well behind everyone else. What else did they do in my lifetime? They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, they took the best Laptop line and sold it to Lenovo and almost ruined it, they tried to be a front runner in ML but…
> Watson on Jeopardy Marketing aside. Lets not forget how cool that was. It was a great public demonstation that AI / ML is possible now.
I do not understand how IBM stays in business. As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique memory architecture but otherwise is well behind everyone else. What else did they do in my lifetime? They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, they took the best Laptop line and sold it to Lenovo and almost ruined it, they tried to be a front runner in ML but…
Because people who make that fatal decision read Gartner magic quadrants.
I set up briefings to Gartner Analysts seeking to get our consultancy on a quad early in the mobile era.
One of them was on the earliest examples of hybrid HTML / native views in iOS. One of our engineers was implementing them in the Apple Store app.
IIRC, Gartner was not ready to split out boutique mobile dev but getting an earworm into an analyst with influence over a quad is still valuable.
I presume there is chatter on potential forming of quads before they make print.
Working these executive-influential information sources, and our firm continuing to land major app dev contracts led to an acquisition by Deloitte Digital.
I do not understand how IBM stays in business. As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique memory architecture but otherwise is well behind everyone else. What else did they do in my lifetime? They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, they took the best Laptop line and sold it to Lenovo and almost ruined it, they tried to be a front runner in ML but…
I think they still make a lot of money from their legacy business, z/OS & mainframes, DB/2 etc still run basically all large banks, insurance companies and many other types of businesses. IBM can charge whatever they want for the hardware and services to support these things because their customers have no alternative. So they have just been farming this for decades, and can afford not to succeed at anything else (so…
No one talks about Oracle. But they're still around. We did a major tech project to migrate off of Oracle after an acquisition of a large org that was running it.
It was a year-long effort to migrate. But it was worth it since Oracle renewal costs were going to be nearly 50% of our IT budget.