Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 985 posts

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#641

Post by vlovich123 »

kelnos wrote: post #622
vlovich123 wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m saying given IBMs track record of completely failing at innovation repeatedly and failing at investing on the correct technologies, why do you assume today’s CEO is better at it and has bucked the milquetoast culture that has pervaded IBM? It’s a company that has largely divested its ability to provide solutions and technology and turned more into a large shop consultancy (+ milking their legacy mainframe contrac…

Except that, over the same time period, IBM was also very successful at innovation and investing in technologies. Yes, they made some very high-profile misses that the top poster lists, but they were still a powerhouse doing other stuff during that time (as a commenter replying to that points out).

Except all the technologies listed were basically in the heydey of the 70s and 80s. Gerstner redirected IBM into an enterprise services business in the early 90s and by the late 90s that's where all their money was. The 2002 acquisition of PwC consulting cemented this shift. In the mid 2010s under Ginni Rometty IBM software became secondary and it abandoned selling it as standalone software instead bundling it into its consultancy.

So IBM hasn't been doing hardware R&D for about three decades and abandoned software R&D well over a decade ago. R&D hasn't been in their DNA for a long time, their previous contributions notwithstanding.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#642

Post by littlecranky67 »

There are so many CEOs, tech experts, financial analysts and famous investors who say we are in an AI bubble - even AI-invested companies say that about themselves. My latest favorite "We are in an AI bubble" comment comes from Linus Torvalds himself in the video with Linus from Linus Tech Tipps [0]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA&t=2063s

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#643

Post by kelnos »

marcosdumay wrote: post #315
throwaway31131 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost per transistor is increasing. or flat, if you stay on a legacy node. They pretty much squeezed all the cost out of 28nm that can be had, and it’s the cheapest per transistor. “based on the graph presented by Milind Shah from Google at the industry tradeshow IEDM, the cost of 100 million transistors normalized to 28nm is actually flat or even increasing.” https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/manufacturing/c…

Yep. Moore's law ended at or shortly before the 28nm era. That's the main reason people stopped upgrading their PCs. And it's probably one of the main reasons everybody is hyped about Risc-V and the pi 2040. If Moore's law was still in effect, none of that would be happening. That may also be a large cause of the failure of Intel.

> Moore's law ended at or shortly before the 28nm era.

Moore's law isn't about cost or clock speed, it's about transistor density. While the pace of transistor density increases has slowed, it's still pretty impressive. If we want to be really strict, and say densities absolutely have to double every 2 years, Moore's Law hasn't actually been true since 1983 or so. But it's been close, so 2x/2yr a decent rubric.

The fall-off from the 2x/2yr line started getting decently pronounced in the mid 90s. At the present time, over the past 5-6 years, we're probably at a doubling in density every 4-ish years. Which yes, is half the rate Moore observed, but is still pretty impressive given how mature the technology is at this point.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#644

Post by fedeb95 »

stevenjgarner wrote: post #240

"It is 1958. IBM passes up the chance to buy a young, fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox is born, and IBM has been kicking themselves ever since. It is ten years later, the late '60s. Digital Equipment DEC and others invent the minicomputer. IBM dismisses the minicomputer as too small to do serious computing and, therefore, unimportant to their business. DEC…

this is cherry picking.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#645

Post by kelnos »

Arainach wrote: post #413
smoe wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Google is bad at building products. They definitely are excellent at scaling products. But I reckon part of the sentiment stems from many of the more famous Google products being acquisitions orignally (Android, YouTube, Maps, Docs, Sheets, DeepMind) or originally built by individual contributors internally (Gmail). Then here were also several times where Google came out with multiple different products…

Starting with an acquisition is a cheap way of accelerating once your company reaches a certain size. Look at Microsoft - Powerpoint was an acquisition. They bought most of the team that designed and built Windows NT from DEC. Frontpage was an acquisition, Azure came after AWS and was led by a series of people brought in in acquisitions (Ray Ozzie, Mark Russinovich, etc.). It's how things happen when you're that big.

I think it's a little unfair to give DEC credit for NT. Sure, they may have bought the team, but they did most (all?) of the work on NT at Microsoft.

That's not like Google buying Android when they already had a functioning (albeit not at all polished) smartphone OS.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#646

Post by rf15 »

mkl wrote: post #578
EagnaIonat wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Took me a while to find again, as there are a lot of such papers in this area. https://www.arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18517

A single author, in a physics department. Seems unlikely to be groundbreaking or authoritative.

Ad hominem right out of the gate? Really?

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#647

Post by carlmr »

esseph wrote: post #579
carlmr wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a separate argument though. A failing company may still be right in identifying other companies failure modes. You can be prescient about failure in one area and still fail yourself. There's no gotcha.

IBM is not a failing company though, they are a Goliath in the Enterprise space.

Still besides the point. The company failing or not is orthogonal to them being able to identify failure in others.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#648

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

stevenjgarner wrote: post #240

"It is 1958. IBM passes up the chance to buy a young, fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox is born, and IBM has been kicking themselves ever since. It is ten years later, the late '60s. Digital Equipment DEC and others invent the minicomputer. IBM dismisses the minicomputer as too small to do serious computing and, therefore, unimportant to their business. DEC…

I’m sorry, but this is stupid, you understand that you have several logical errors in your post? I was sure Clinton is going to win 2016. Does that mean that when I say 800 is bigger than 8 is not to be trusted?

Do people actually think that running a business is some magical realism where you can manifest yourself to become a billionaire if you just believe hard enough?

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#649

Post by hollerith »

baq wrote: post #566
hollerith wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your reason for believing that IBM was selling software as a service in the IBM 360 days? What hardware did the users of this service use to connect to the service?

Hardware was part of the service, obviously.

It is very misleading or outright perverse to write "they were selling software as a service in the IBM 360 days" when there was no public network that could be used to the deliver the service. (There were wide-area networks, but each one was used by a single organization and possibly a few of its most important customers and suppliers, hence the qualifier "public" above.)

But anyways, my question to you is, was there any software that IBM charged money for as opposed to providing the software at no additional cost with the purchase or rental of a computer?

I do know that no one sold software software (i.e., commercial off-the-shelf software) in the 1960s: the legal framework that allowed software owners to bring lawsuits for copyright violations appeared in the early 1980s.

There was an organization named SHARE composed of customers of IBM whereby one customer could obtain software written by other other customers (much like the open-source ecosystem) but I don't recall money ever changing hands for any of this software except a very minimal fee (orders of magnitude lower than the rental or purchase price of a System/360, which started at about $660,000 in 2025 dollars).

Also, IIUC most owners or renters of a System/360 had to employ programmers to adapt the software IBM provided. There is software with that quality these days, too (.e.g, ERP software for large enterprises) but no one calls that a software as a service.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#650

Post by walt_grata »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #648
stevenjgarner wrote: post #240

"It is 1958. IBM passes up the chance to buy a young, fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox is born, and IBM has been kicking themselves ever since. It is ten years later, the late '60s. Digital Equipment DEC and others invent the minicomputer. IBM dismisses the minicomputer as too small to do serious computing and, therefore, unimportant to their business. DEC…

I’m sorry, but this is stupid, you understand that you have several logical errors in your post? I was sure Clinton is going to win 2016. Does that mean that when I say 800 is bigger than 8 is not to be trusted? Do people actually think that running a business is some magical realism where you can manifest yourself to become a billionaire if you just believe hard enough?

The post is almost worse than you give it credit for. Like it doesn't even take into account different people are making the decisions.
Post reply on HN