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IBM Bob

bob.ibm.com

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Re: IBM Bob

#341

Post by wvenable »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #65

You should never name a tech product Bob in the UK, because the moment it isn't perfect, it'll just get called "Bobbins" [0], especially where I'm from. I wish IBM got better at product again, and took themselves off the services and consulting morphine they've been on for ~35 years now since OS/2 Warp flopped. Their 1980s/1990s hardware was great. Their software actually was great until Win95 took their lunch money.…

> I wish IBM got better at product again...

I'm not sure where that "again" comes from. IBM has never been good a product and everybody is looking at OS/2 through glasses so rose tinted that they're essentially blind. The PC itself was a skunk-works project that was removed from their influence as soon as the rest of company got involved.

Re: IBM Bob

#343

Post by lokar »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #339
Alien1Being wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing is happening to Microsoft and Google. A slow, long slide through mediocrity into irrelevance...

Alphabet is operating and expanding the only fleet of fully autonomous vehicles in the world, to rave reviews. The first contact with AI most people have is Gemini. And their net income went from $74B to $100B to $132B in 3 years and profit margin from 24% to 32%. Mediocrity and irrelevant are hardly how I would describe them.

You could interpret the comment as a prediction based on the same pattern of overwhelming internal bureaucracy impacting engineering innovation. Control swinging entirely over to finance and legal. Focused entirely on rent seeking and protecting monopolies.

Eventually these patterns kill companies.

Re: IBM Bob

#344

Post by bronlund »

jolt42 wrote: post #226
PaulRobinson wrote: post #65

You should never name a tech product Bob in the UK, because the moment it isn't perfect, it'll just get called "Bobbins" [0], especially where I'm from. I wish IBM got better at product again, and took themselves off the services and consulting morphine they've been on for ~35 years now since OS/2 Warp flopped. Their 1980s/1990s hardware was great. Their software actually was great until Win95 took their lunch money.…

OS/2 was the only thing I remembering being great. If they practically gave it away I think we'd be living in a different world. Pre-emptive multitasking long before OSX/Windows. I mean Microsoft essentially had to force windows (eg. 3.1) down our throats until it become tolerable.

They are still forcing Windows down our throats.

Re: IBM Bob

#345

Post by tedd4u »

epsteingpt wrote: post #312

For all the smarm and jokes, IBM still makes ~$70B in annual revenue and enables billions more in systems integrators. Not many companies can say that. This allows them to take the secondary revenue in-house and potentially fund a new mainframe business. It's a [smart-ish because it's their only] strategy for the near term, because long term businesses will be moving off their mainframes and onto more powerful and in…

Agreed. Note, that is at ~50% gross margin and ~15% profit margin which I guess is pretty typical of computer hardware vendors.

Re: IBM Bob

#346

Post by jasomill »

wvenable wrote: post #341
PaulRobinson wrote: post #65

You should never name a tech product Bob in the UK, because the moment it isn't perfect, it'll just get called "Bobbins" [0], especially where I'm from. I wish IBM got better at product again, and took themselves off the services and consulting morphine they've been on for ~35 years now since OS/2 Warp flopped. Their 1980s/1990s hardware was great. Their software actually was great until Win95 took their lunch money.…

> I wish IBM got better at product again... I'm not sure where that "again" comes from. IBM has never been good a product and everybody is looking at OS/2 through glasses so rose tinted that they're essentially blind. The PC itself was a skunk-works project that was removed from their influence as soon as the rest of company got involved.

Not so much rose-colored glasses, but in comparison to MS-DOS and 16-bit Windows, 32-bit OS/2 was a dream.

Native application support was limited, and it was even less of a pure 32-bit OS than Windows 95, but for about a year it was the only game in town if you wanted to run 16-bit Windows applications with preemptive multitasking and memory protection, and still had some advantages over NT when it shipped.

I don't remember all the details, but I recall not switching to NT full-time until 3.5, and even then the UI wasn't as nice.

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