[HN Gopher] Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President
___________________________________________________________________
Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President
Author : sweettea
Score : 161 points
Date : 2021-07-02 14:41 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (newsroom.ibm.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (newsroom.ibm.com)
| mrtweetyhack wrote:
| Jim Whitehurst fired
| stuff4ben wrote:
| We all hoped it wouldn't happen, but RedHat is going to become
| more blue rather than the other way around. It's the way with all
| acquisitions unfortunately. As a current IBMer, I'm fascinated
| with this and I wonder what Arvind's end goal was here? It
| certainly doesn't seem like it was Jim's idea.
| datahead wrote:
| 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.
|
| Honestly, I thought IBM would be feel less rudderless with him at
| the helm. I wanted IBM to become more 'red' and not RH to become
| more 'big blue'- but it appears this isn't the case after all...
| seems like a short tenure.
|
| Anyone know more about the new leadership?
| shadilay wrote:
| This is exactly how I feel. I thought Jim would make IBM more
| like redhat but in reality redhat became more like IBM.
| Sylamore wrote:
| 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.
| htrp wrote:
| In every acquisition the Acquirer imposes on the Acquiree.....
|
| In this case, I'd bet that it's Arvind Krishna pulling people
| out of IBM Cloud (his old division) to run the rest of "big
| blue"
|
| And yes, IBM will basically bleed talent from Red Hat for the
| next 3 years until RHEL is a pale shadow of its former self.
| [deleted]
| paiute wrote:
| I expect IBM will be an Irish or similar company soon.
| raverbashing wrote:
| It already is ;)
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Same as google..
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/search/google,+dublin/@53.340
| 165...
| na85 wrote:
| What's an Irish company, in this context?
| simcop2387 wrote:
| I believe they're referring to this,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland_as_a_tax_haven
| spitfire wrote:
| Exception to this rule was NeXT purchasing Apple for negative
| $400 million.
|
| Most of the NeXT senior staff (jabs, avi, etc) Went on to
| take over roles at Apple. They also brought in all the NeXT
| technology and threw out Apples' Nextstep/Openstep->Mac OSX
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They were acquired by their old boss so less of a culture
| clash and no need for turf wars between opposing sides.
| Ryder123 wrote:
| Steve Jobs had been gone for 12 years, there was plenty
| of culture clash and turf wars. Steve just managed to
| prevail.
|
| When he returned, the workforce was pampered and attached
| to projects that weren't going anywhere. Steve removed a
| number of perks, and killed some of the biggest, most
| internally popular projects (Newton and OpenDoc come to
| mind). Lot's of people left.
|
| But Steve came back to Apple as a savvy politician. He
| managed to get the board of directors in his back pocket,
| and sell his vision of Apple to the employees. Those that
| stayed, stayed because they came to believe in his
| vision, not because he placated them.
|
| I will say this though, I think there's a truth
| underneath your statement. Apple attracted people who
| wanted to change the world. The culture may have been
| different, but there was still a core motivation in Apple
| employees that came from Steve's original vision of
| computing.
| wrs wrote:
| Minor correction: I wouldn't call Newton an "internally
| popular product". At least, working on Newton I didn't
| feel that way. And just before SJ came back, Apple had
| spun Newton out into a separate company because it wasn't
| really fitting in. SJ spun it back in and killed it.
| eternalban wrote:
| Would love to learn more about Newton - history and/or
| tech. Any resources on the web or anything interesting
| you may want to share?
| atatatat wrote:
| Anyone have any insight on why Red Hat sold their soul?
| rst wrote:
| The decision was in the hands of a board whose sole legal
| goal, these days, is securing maximal financial return for
| shareholders (and the shareholders agreed -- there was an
| explicit vote). A soul is a luxury that companies don't
| usually get to keep past IPO.
| ghaff wrote:
| _Sole?_ No. No matter how many times people repeat it.
| Or, at least, companies can and do spend money on things
| that can be argued to be in service of the long-term
| profit and image of the company. Otherwise, how could a
| company do charitable giving?
|
| That said, if someone makes an offer for a public
| company, the board _does_ pretty much need to put it to a
| shareholder vote although they can negotiate for a higher
| price and ultimately make a recommendation. But it 's up
| to the shareholders. They're the ones that own the
| company.
| analognoise wrote:
| "Otherwise, how could a company do charitable giving?"
|
| Because it's a tax write-off and makes for good press?
| rst wrote:
| "long-term profit" _is_ the long-term financial returns
| to shareholders -- and corporate philanthropy is
| generally held to be justified in B-school circles only
| in so far as it builds up marketable goodwill (again,
| adding shareholder value), not for its own sake.
| ghaff wrote:
| At that point though, just about any reasonable actions
| can be justified even if they're not in the interests of
| immediate quarter earnings per share. And that's not what
| most people arguing that the board is legally required to
| maximize profits are talking about.
| fossuser wrote:
| This is why I'm in favor of founder controlled shares
| (Founder's Fund companies tend to do this - Zuckerberg at
| FB).
|
| Founder's retain total voting control of the company and
| can do what they think is in the best interest of the
| company.
|
| The board can complain and vote against it in favor of
| stupid short-term decisions that harm in the company, but
| in the end Zuck can tell them to fuck off and buy
| instagram because he thinks it's the right thing to do.
| ghaff wrote:
| While I don't completely disagree, a Benevolent (or not)
| Dictator For Life can have it's own set of problems. And
| I'd not that it's generally _not_ considered a great
| governance model for large open source projects--though
| that 's obviously a somewhat different situation.
| fossuser wrote:
| I agree founder led companies are more like dictatorships
| (though feudal earldoms may be a better analogy?), this
| becomes less true in older companies no longer lead by a
| founder. I agree there's risk (founder could lose touch
| or go crazy), but I think that risk is less likely than
| bad board decisions by non-founders. It's also bounded a
| bit by the ability to retain high quality talent.
|
| I also agree that for collaborative open source projects
| a different approach is often preferable (as well as
| governments too obviously).
| houseofzeus wrote:
| They were a publicly traded company and IBM offered
| something like $190 a share when they were trading around
| $120.
| TheDong wrote:
| > leadership style being around a lot of smart engineers [...]
| building inclusive company culture in tech.
|
| Red Hat was certainly an open company. I don't know if
| "inclusive" is the right word though. "Inclusive" has strong
| connotations now of people being welcoming, especially of those
| that are different.
|
| This is largely anecdotal, but my interactions with Red Hat and
| external observations can better be summed up as "build a good-
| old-boys club of mostly white males who are regularly assholes"
| than "build an inclusive culture". I know those words are
| harsh, but the experiences I've had and have heard of are
| negative enough to warrant those words.
|
| From my perspective, Red Hat seems to have created a culture of
| hiring smart engineers and then giving them leeway to be
| assholes under the guise of "open communication" and
| "meritocracy".
|
| Honestly, memo list feels like a microcosm of this entire
| thing. It's a place where there originally were no guardrails
| under the guise of "free speech" and "openness", and it quickly
| devolved into a hostile place that made people feel anything
| but included.
| evol262 wrote:
| 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 things are late, but as driven
| company missions which they spend real money on (and real
| money on community involvement on), it's not insignificant.
|
| A "good-old-boy's club" at a company where only 25% of
| engineering was even in the US is a little mindblowing. The
| vast majority of RH's engineers when I left were in Pune,
| Brno, Tel Aviv, and scattered across Europe (eastern and
| western), with a reasonable showing from Brazil.
|
| Open source is, for better or worse, a place where a cult of
| personality matters. "This is a bad idea and we shouldn't do
| it" isn't personal. It's how the community interacts. It's an
| invitation to argue back and say "this is a good idea because
| XXX". This is basically how any upstream mailing list works
| also.
|
| While Red Hat did have some cultural problems, they were
| primarily around resistance to establishing an engineering
| presence in China (and it's hard to fault them for that -- my
| team was truly geographically distributed, and adding someone
| in APAC would have meant we literally never could have met at
| the same time), and regional cultural attitudes.
|
| I left last summer, along with a lot of other people, but
| your comment is apropos of nothing Red Hat was from
| 2013-2021.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > 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.
| evol262 wrote:
| 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.
| zxzax wrote:
| I agree with the rest of your comment but I just want to
| respond to this part:
|
| >If you don't have thick skin, you should probably avoid
| upstream discussions
|
| I have a humble request, please discontinue this attitude
| on your own projects and please encourage other upstreams
| to also discontinue it. I'm baffled as to why so many
| open source maintainers seem to confuse needing to defend
| technical decisions with "having a thick skin," they are
| not the same. It's perfectly possible to be opinionated
| and strongly scrutinize a technical decision, while also
| not being harsh and rude towards the person presenting
| it. If you believe those mailing lists are unsalvageably
| hostile, then in my opinion, they should just be shut
| down. That's not the kind of place to have official
| project communication.
| chakkepolja wrote:
| > white males
|
| This is HN not twitter.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Dismissing a whole comment to focus on two out of context
| words is very much like Twitter. I see several excellent
| comments responding to the best read of it. And then
| there's your comment.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| If you're the type of person who cares about and engages in
| internal mailing list drama, why not keep it there?
| datahead wrote:
| I'm curious if our interactions could be biased. For example,
| we're clients of RH (RHEL & Openshift) so I'm guessing we
| interact with more presentable humans. Everyone I've met has
| been genuinely wonderful and supportive across eng, sales,
| product, TAM, etc. One of the few vendors I enjoy working
| with.
|
| I used inclusive in this context to mean that a junior
| engineer is expected to speak up and offer input in an
| executive meeting if they have something to offer. Cutting
| through hierarchy, "good ideas come from everywhere". This
| could be idealistic but it helped me in eliciting input.
|
| I don't know what it's like to be on the inside or close
| periphery to daily core operations at RH. I agree and
| understand completely what you are saying. "Free speech" has
| (recently?) been a guise to act terribly toward each other in
| a number of settings. Trolls gonna troll. It's important to
| maintain decorum in the workplace and a culture that defies
| that can turn toxic quickly.
| TheDong wrote:
| My interactions have largely been meatspace and in open
| source communities they are heavily involved in (outside of
| k8s).
|
| We do seem to have either interacted with difference slices
| of the company, or gotten different impressions.
|
| Which is all well and good, an aggregate of anecdotes is
| better than just one.
| [deleted]
| slownews45 wrote:
| Redhat are one of the few real open source companies that
| made a commercial success of things.
|
| From the outside they seemed pretty open. I've got no idea
| about how they did with black / LGBTQ+ - but it seems a big
| jump (in an industry where there are not that many black
| female LGBTQ+ engineers) to say they were so bad.
|
| What is the engineering company with lots of black female
| LGBTQ+ folks? It might be helpful to be able to look at a
| model that has worked rather than just trashing RedHat for
| not being an engineering company that gets this right (and
| all these companies are pushing initiatives in most of these
| areas).
| hal-employee wrote:
| I thought Jim was going to be the next CEO.
| datahead wrote:
| I did as well, and was rooting for him.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Well so long to Redhat improving the culture at IBM
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| One of my recent revelations was when I told my teen children
| "... a company like IBM".
|
| To what they said "what is IBM??"
|
| They know all the large tech companies but that one was a
| surprise to them, they had a look at Wikipedia and said "ah yes,
| it was a great company in your times".
|
| Time to get some wine.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Even for me as a millennial, IBM is something of a history
| note.
|
| Yes, I know them from computing history lectures, and I liked
| their ThinkPads (but they sold that to Lenovo when I was in
| high school).
|
| I have only directly interacted with IBM product once, and that
| was Lotus Notes in one corporation I worked as a tech support
| in university years. And it was horrible.
|
| At university, I thought of IBM as "they do things that are
| invisible but probably important?", but now I guess they don't
| do even that.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Notes interface was crap but it did have some interesting
| tech. Also it was bought, not originated at ibm. They could
| have fixed it I suppose.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| Well, a lot of companies still have old ibm tech they will
| never ever replace. Or replace them by new ibm tech.
|
| And red hat /openshift is huge in germany. Only startups run
| on k8s... Especially in insurance and banking.
| allenu wrote:
| I interned at IBM Canada in the late 90s and I remember back
| then among my peer group, the only thing we cared about was
| that they made great laptops in the ThinkPad line (now owned by
| Lenovo, of course).
|
| It definitely felt like an "old" company even then. I remember
| they were very big on patents and were proud of the fact that
| they had a huge patent war chest.
| avereveard wrote:
| IBM portfolio isn't targeted to consumers like Apple's or other
| companies, even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a
| household name. The only consumer facing product they had for
| the longest time were cash registers, and those aren't
| particularly hip as to live in consumer imagination
|
| Edit: in today episode, hacker news forget they're a niche
| cohort.
| reggieband wrote:
| It's funny because when I read something like this (and your
| pretty harsh replies) I feel attacked! I mean, there are a
| lot of reasons you might say this including but not limited
| to: you weren't alive (or were too young) in the 70s/80s, you
| were in a country that had a different culture, you grew up
| in your own bubble.
|
| And maybe, just maybe, my memory is bad. But I really feel
| almost gaslit. Like where someone is telling me my lived
| experience wasn't my lived experience. I remember IBM as one
| of the most recognizable brands of the time. I recall in
| social studies class a teacher talking about how IBM sold
| calculating devices to Nazi Germany during the war. I
| remember another class where we discussed IBMs infamous
| "THINK" posters, which we discussed in relation to propaganda
| and subliminal messaging. I remember that THINK poster
| showing up as a gag in the early Simpsons TV show. When Apple
| made the famous super bowl commercial where the athlete
| throws a sledge-hammer at the George Orwell-esque Big Brother
| screen, every news outlet was going on-and-on about how it
| was a direct attack on IBM and the stodgy perception that PCs
| were only for business. And of course the whole Deep Blue
| chess match. Heck, even the Jeopardy Watson thing had IBM
| branding all over it. In all of those cases IBM had a
| cultural currency that anchored the discussion.
|
| I would honestly be completely and genuinely surprised to
| find any people in my age group born and raised in North
| America wouldn't immediately recognize the IBM brand.
|
| When I think of niche tech brands from that time I believe
| Oracle and Cisco fit that "you only know if you know" kind of
| niche. But IBM? It actually feels so completely unbelievable
| to me that it can't be true. But hey, maybe you're right and
| I'm wrong?
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| The IBM Thinkpad was probably the most well known laptop
| brand for 10-15 years. Even now I would guess people still
| equate "Thinkpad" with IBM even though they sold it off to
| Lenovo 15 years ago.
| twiddling wrote:
| As an IBMer at the time, I remember having conversations
| about how that decision would ultimately doom IBM to
| irrelevance since it would remove IBM entirely from the
| consumer market...
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| Don't forget they sold the tiny HDD division to Hitachi
| (I believe) in like 1999 or 2000, which went on to earn
| billions from the iPod. Not a lot of good business
| decisions coming out of IBM.
| cptnapalm wrote:
| Despite not having one, I was mystified by such the
| obviously terrible idea of selling off the daily "I love
| my IBM" from who knows how many tech people's lives.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household
| name.
|
| Even if this were the case, they would have been part of
| nearly every office in one way or another and they certainly
| are not now.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| As far as I'm concerned, the term "PC" comes from the "IBM
| PC"[1]
|
| > " _The PC was IBM 's first attempt to sell a computer
| through retail channels [...] they partnered with the retail
| chains ComputerLand and Sears Roebuck_"
|
| > " _Reception was overwhelmingly positive [...] the IBM PC
| immediately became the talk of the entire computing
| industry.[38] Dealers were overwhelmed with orders [...] By
| the time the machine was shipping, the term "PC" was becoming
| a household name.[39] [...] Sales exceeded IBM's expectations
| by as much as 800%, shipping 40,000 PCs a month at one
| point.[40] The company estimate that 50 to 70% of PCs sold in
| retail stores went to the home._"
|
| It is worth noting how small the market was at the time
| though, " _In 1983 they sold more than 750,000 machines_ " -
| Apple has just passed 100,000,000 iPhone 12s in six months
| since launch.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
| avereveard wrote:
| > It is worth noting how small the market was at the time
| though, "In 1983 they sold more than 750,000 machines" -
| Apple has just passed 100,000,000 iPhone 12s in six months
| since launch.
|
| which is the goddamn point. it was a name in tech circles,
| and this community forgets how small tech circles were back
| then
|
| heck, someone even cited the cell processor in playstation.
| outside the nerdiest of gamers, very few actually cared,
| and the name that stuck and resonated from that item was
| playstation, not ibm anyway.
|
| want some name that public would recognize in the 80s? try
| nintendo and sega.
|
| >>>> I told my teen children "... a company like IBM". To
| what they said "what is IBM??"
|
| kid back then would have had the same reaction as the gp
| kids at hearing ibm.
|
| this community is completely out of touch and filled with
| vitriol.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| avereveard wrote:
| 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.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > 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
| avereveard wrote:
| what I see is a lot of people thinking their bubble is
| relevant for the public at large, even discounting the
| rampant americentrism
| ghaff wrote:
| Now you're just being rude and I and others are telling
| you that you're almost certainly wrong. I'm not
| particularly surprised that a teen today wouldn't have
| heard of IBM. (It's a large, but one of many, enterprise
| computing suppliers. I assume they haven't heard of
| VMware or Oracle either.) I actually would be surprised
| if a typical child of the Space Age in 1970 wouldn't have
| heard of it given that IBM pretty much was COMPUTER in
| the public mind.
|
| I'm pretty sure I would have known most of the largest US
| companies as a teen, including IBM, because of their
| cultural ubiquity, not because I had a PC (which didn't
| exist).
| sedatk wrote:
| > even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household
| name
|
| In addition to other examples in the thread, OS/2 Warp was a
| direct competitor to Windows 95. We could be using OS/2 today
| instead of Windows had it become successful.
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| In IBM's heydey, everyone knew who IBM was. Even before the
| PC, IBM was synonymous with "computer". People knew computers
| were important, even if they had never seen one outside of a
| movie.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| > even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household
| name
|
| IBM was synonymous with PC for quite some time.
| op00to wrote:
| IBM was synonymous with COMPUTERS for quite some time.
| avereveard wrote:
| At a time when pc weren't household items, that came about
| quite later
| [deleted]
| mech422 wrote:
| PC's were big in the 80s, and 'PC' meant IBM PC (or
| clone). The rest of us had 'commodore's or 'atari's - we
| didn't have 'pc's. It was also the heyday of computer
| magazine's from PC shopper to DDJ and Compute! Computers
| weren't as unknown back then as people like to think..
|
| So I'd argue IBM was a household name as far back as the
| mid-80s.
| ghaff wrote:
| Much longer ago than that. I'm quite certain that long
| before there even was an IBM PC and almost certainly
| before I touched an IBM Selectric, I would have known IBM
| as a computer company. If someone in the 1960s had been
| asked to name a computer company, they would have named
| IBM and I'm not talking about nerdy niche audiences.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| It even overlapped with the period AOL was a thing.
| Unless you're suggesting that wasn't a household name,
| either.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Those PC ads featuring a Charlie Chaplin lookalike was well
| known.
| avidpsychlist wrote:
| yeah, in my early youth "IBM" or "IBM Compatible" (for the
| value shoppers out there, such as my family) was very much
| a household name...if your household had a computer at all,
| that is.
| ulzeraj wrote:
| Remember when IBM tech powered every popular video game
| console? Not long ago. I thought having POWER machines for
| gaming was very cool. It didn't worked out for some reason.
| kjs3 wrote:
| I dunno. I thought it worked out pretty well...it just
| didn't last into subsequent generations. But then, in
| gaming consoles, up until the current fad of "meh...just
| make it a PC", every generation of console was,
| architecturally speaking, new territory.
| lancefisher wrote:
| This is true. You had an IBM or an IBM compatible PC
| running DOS and then Windows. I was well aware of IBM at a
| young age.
| browningstreet wrote:
| How many times was that phrase used in computer
| magazines? I kind of forgot about it, this thread has
| brought me back to the days I would sift through computer
| magazines at book stores.
| cmxch wrote:
| > cash registers
|
| Don't you mean NCR, even in light of what IBM did for cash
| registers?
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| There were IBM cash registers and they outperformed modern
| equipment in scanner performance by a wide margin 30 years
| ago. That division was sold off to Toshiba.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household
| name.
|
| This is not true.
| trimbo wrote:
| > even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household
| name
|
| I'm curious to see data on this. My guess is that in the
| early to mid 80s, IBM had to have been the top consumer
| technology brand. At least in knowledge of the brand, even if
| they didn't own one. Their Charlie Chaplin ads were
| everywhere, then they spent an enormous amount of money
| marketing PCjr[1].
|
| [1] - "As part of $32.5 million in advertising for the
| computer during 1984, it began what the company described as
| the most extensive marketing campaign in IBM history, in
| which 98% of Americans would see at least 30 PCjr
| advertisements in the last four months of the year". (From
| Wikipedia)
| deckard1 wrote:
| my impression of the mid '90s was that IBM also spent a
| boatload on OS/2 Warp marketing as well. But by that time
| everyone was on Windows and wanted Windows95. The ads for
| Warp were everywhere, in print and on TV. IBM seemed to be
| reliving the same mistakes they made with the PS/2 and
| micro channel arch.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I can't picture IBM being consumer.. they were too deep
| and too big. They didn't speak mainstream .. Jobs had
| some stuff to sell (aesthetics, art, culture) .. IBM had
| 'enterprise grade'.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Yes, they tried but it fell flat. Hindsight and all that.
| indymike wrote:
| IBM was synonymous with high tech in the 1970s and 1980s.
| From the Styx song Mr. Roboto, "...my blood is boiling, my
| brain IBM".
|
| They were a huge deal.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Information Society, the band also had a few IBM
| references in their geeky repertoire.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Not a household name? Not hip? Lacking imagination?
|
| "How're you gonna do it? You're gonna PS/2 it!"
| excitom wrote:
| The IBM Selectric typewriter was ubiquitous in offices
| everywhere, and IBM copiers and printers were quite
| prevalent.
| avereveard wrote:
| in _offices_
| dvh wrote:
| The "I" in FAANG stands for IBM
| DevKoala wrote:
| One or two of those will be dropped in the next decade or
| two. It is how things go.
|
| In fact, Netflix is only there nowadays to avoid the acronym
| from becoming offensive.
| jhickok wrote:
| And it doesn't include Microsoft for some reason. FANMAG
| always made more sense to me.
| zacherates wrote:
| ... because FAANG was about compensation and MS is not
| competitive (at least for mid-career hires).
|
| Take a look at levels 62 / 63 at MS vs. comparable roles
| at FAANGs: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,
| Facebook,Micro...
| jhickok wrote:
| I won't pretend to understand how these levels compare,
| but it looks on par with Apple, no?
|
| My understanding of FANG initially was that it was about
| tech stock performance and not compensation.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes, Jim Cramer coined the term AFAIK. Though it did map
| reasonably well to comp, in part because tech workers
| usually had RSUs as a major part of their comp.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Since Google is Alphabet, we can use FAAAM (or FAAAMN)
| instead.
| odiroot wrote:
| IBM should definitely have a place there. Netflix is the one
| that's not like the others.
| CardenB wrote:
| The acronym refers to pay, not tech. IBM doesn't match the
| pay of FAANG
| ghaff wrote:
| It's come to mean that but it was originally about stock
| --between which there was correlation.
| ternaryoperator wrote:
| Nope. It refers to the stocks of the companies. Nothing
| to do with pay[0]
|
| [0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/faang-stocks.asp
| amelius wrote:
| And where is the M for Microsoft? The acronym doesn't make
| much sense if you ask me.
| genedan wrote:
| When I was growing up, my mother was at IBM designing software
| for the space shuttle, and the street next to my house was
| named IBM. I was named after one of their senior engineers. So
| the company played a big part in my childhood and was ever
| present in the community, and we still have lots of IBM space
| swag stored away in the attic, including the silver snoopy
| given to my mom during her time there. The stock grants paid
| for our education, and my mom still lives off the pension they
| had. The early 90s was such an optimistic time.
|
| At some point IBM sold off the unit, vacated the office block,
| and the street was renamed to that of the new company that
| moved in. Eventually, all the shuttle workers would be laid off
| after the demise of the program, so it's sad to see how it all
| ended.
| pm90 wrote:
| 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.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| 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.
| shadilay wrote:
| China like Japan has it's own problems. In the case of
| the US, offshoring of manufacturing surely played a part
| but greater than that is the financialization of the
| economy, decline of the middle class, and the capture of
| wealth generation in the hands of a few.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| IBM doesn't make consumer products, as they did in decades
| past. I would imagine there are a lot of successful technology
| companies without a consumer side that your kids aren't
| familiar with. Booz Allen?
| agumonkey wrote:
| I always remind myself that hollerith machines was born in the
| 19th century.. it's a long game :)
| jve wrote:
| I'm 33, allergic to IBM (and Oracle), want to stay away from
| their products if possible.
|
| Luckily I know nothing about IBM, only the spectrum protect
| backup... I mean why everything has to be so complicated? Ugly?
|
| Props for having documentation + they support lots of OSes and
| features. But when it comes to management... even Linux people
| in my office make fun of that product, because how awkward,
| complex and time consuming it is to do particular tasks there.
| I showed Veeam admin some spectrum protect stuff, because he
| had todo some task there... He just laughed out loud.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| From what little exposure that I've had to IBM, Oracle, and
| professional HP products, it's the result of a different
| evolutionary line of computing. It predates personal
| computing (from back when there was allegedly market for 5
| computers[0]), so its interface and naming conventions are
| foreign to each other, as if it lives in ivory towers and
| never mixes with anything else. It's painfully obvious that
| personal computing moves much faster and is easier to use.
|
| [0] https://freakonomics.com/2008/04/17/our-daily-bleg-did-
| ibm-r...
| htrp wrote:
| Stock is down 4%
| crb002 wrote:
| He sold _zero_ IBM System Z mainframes to AWS.
|
| He let thousands of IBM point of sale systems to be replaced with
| crap that can't buffer keystrokes - instead of modernizing the
| SDKs for those who know Linux and not AIX.
|
| He bought RedHat, but not Digital Ocean so they had a cloud
| consumers trust.
|
| He didn't win a serious contract with Facebook for kernel tuning.
| He didn't win a serious contract with AWS for AWS Linux 3.
|
| He let COBOL and APL continue to die instead of funding modern
| tooling.
| rvz wrote:
| Jim Who?
|
| The man who sold the red hat to big blue?
| peytoncasper wrote:
| Cloud is the new mainframe. And IBM Cloud is terrible in
| comparison.
|
| All you ever hear about is how challenging Kubernetes is to
| manage. IBM invested in self managed Kubernetes essentially while
| everyone else built SaaS Kubernetes Engine's.
|
| IBM feels like a collection of revenue lines that hasn't really
| tapped into any new streams lately.
| jhickok wrote:
| For what it's worth IBM has transitioned to OpenShift and it is
| a very successful product line. I think there are a lot of
| problems with marrying OpenShift with IBM's other products but
| OpenShift on IBM Cloud is pretty good.
| peytoncasper wrote:
| I'm sure it's successful to some degree. They bought it,
| because it was a successful enterprise implementation.
|
| That being said, I'm not sure why I would leverage OpenShift
| on IBM Cloud when I can get practically the same thing from
| the other providers with a stronger ecosystem of tooling.
|
| Which leads me back to OpenShift on-premise and I'm just not
| sure that is where the market is at or headed right now.
| jhickok wrote:
| I view OpenShift, ultimately, as a bridge technology that
| leads to pure cloud k8s, but there is a heck of a lot of
| money to be made in the meantime.
|
| IBM Cloud gets new OpenShift features quicker than other
| cloud providers.
| thedougd wrote:
| IBM can recover from this with some stock buybacks. Maybe borrow
| to get it done.
| mathattack wrote:
| Only maybe? They're bleeding cash with the failed split. Of
| course they will need to!
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| I saw this coming even before the acquisition. While Red Hat did
| help fund some excellent open source work, usually through
| acquisitions, they would never have been my first choice for
| partner support. Red hat is for companies that have no clue what
| they are doing and caters to executive management who wants their
| name in marketing so they can talk about how they helped make the
| company more successful so they can find a higher paying
| executive role at another large enterprise. Once a company has
| some descent Linux engineers and developers, they then switch to
| CentOS, Ubuntu, or some lighter weight distro. At that point, if
| you continue to engage with Red Hat, usually because some
| executive is getting kickbacks and has signed multi-year
| contracts, you just end up doing all the work yourself realizing
| that a lot of your problems are caused by Red Hat and that you'd
| be better off with another distro entirely.
| throwawayoung wrote:
| Early redhatter here. I will always have mixed feelings about
| Jim. On the one hand, I fully respect him, what he does, and how
| he does it. I think he was a good choice for redhat at the time.
|
| However, his start also coincided with then end of the really fun
| times.
| jhickok wrote:
| I feel that is normal in the lifecycle of a growing business--
| at some point you have to exit startup mode and get corporate,
| no?
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Yeah but then the fun ends unless you are into the manager
| mindset.
| pm90 wrote:
| Could you expand on that? Did he centralize planning or tighten
| budgets or something?
| ghaff wrote:
| As someone who was following Red Hat as an industry analyst
| at the time, it was growing a lot and everything that implies
| came with it. To the sibling comment's point, that meant
| moving away from "everyone" knowing everyone else, moving
| away from a lot of people being involved with and
| knowledgeable about most of the company's technology (though
| JBoss was still sort of its own island at the time), and lots
| of things being sort of ad hoc. A lot of people had pretty
| flexible roles.
|
| I won't say things totally changed but, as is necessary as
| you grow, more process was put in place, there was a more
| deliberate use of data, a shift from "random acts" that made
| sense in isolation to more programmatic ways of doing things.
|
| These things weren't bad and were in fact needed. But, even
| if Red Hat wasn't really still a startup when Whitehurst took
| over, it wasn't really a mature large company either.
| echelon wrote:
| I'd really like to see IBMers talk about the past, present, and
| future of the company. It looks pretty pale to me.
|
| Back in the Thinkpad era, IBM had a lot of cool stuff going on.
| But now it seems like a shadow.
|
| Watson and IBM cloud look like flops. The email fiasco is weird
| and should never have happened.
|
| What did buying Red Hat accomplish? As an outsider, it doesn't
| seem to have infused any new ideas, and the changes to centos
| just made people move further away AFAIK.
|
| Or buying stuff like the Weather Channel?
|
| The chip business looks promising. Maybe IBM should double down
| there?
|
| Consulting, in general, seems to not be a great tool to sharpen
| internal capability. The constant layoffs of the past have also
| had a hugely deleterious effect.
| acoard wrote:
| >What did buying Red Hat accomplish? As an outsider, it doesn't
| seem to have infused any new ideas, and the changes to centos
| just made people move further away AFAIK.
|
| I am not an IBMer though have worked with many former IBM
| folks, and work with Red Hat on and off every month or so. From
| what I've gathered, Red Hat is the new core of IBM. The goal is
| to grow Red Hat, specifically their OpenShift offering (which
| is huge in gov't as it allows for hybrid clouds), and make
| centre the biz around that then the "traditional" IBM
| consulting style.
| Retric wrote:
| IBM's core business is boring crap that doesn't make the news.
| So, how the company is doing has little to do with the kinds of
| things you hear about. That said, their market cap peaked in
| 2012 at 240B vs 130B today and their revenue and profits are
| similarly down, which suggests things haven't been going well
| for a long time.
| throwaway57754 wrote:
| IBM bought Red Hat for OpenShift. IBM buying Red Hat was
| supposed to propel OpenShift and Red Hats portfolio into the
| C-suite connections IBM had. Instead, it seems IBM has force
| marched Red Hat to focus all their energies on OpenShift at the
| expense of their larger portfolio. OpenShift probably isn't
| performing as well as IBM expected, and even with 4 it still
| carries the "OpenShift is not Kubernetes" vibe. IBM also has a
| bunch of products in their portfolio that compete with Red Hat.
|
| On the IBM side, weird shit is a foot. The GTS spinoff into
| Khndryl is very, very bizarre. They're a profitable part of IBM
| but need to be excised, quickly? It's causing chaos for
| accounts that had deep GTS coverage as the account teams are
| basically adversarial. The rest of IBMs portfolio is stagnating
| as they chase fads and lose to niche players with better
| overall value. Especially with the Data/AI space, startups are
| killing them.
| rescbr wrote:
| ex-IBMer here, product side: GTS sometimes had better private
| pricing and incentives for products from competitors that
| other business units couldn't match due to internal pricing
| policies.
|
| Now try explaining to the customer why IBM is recommending an
| IBM's competitor while IBM is also offering the same product
| with a better price directly to the customer. It doesn't make
| sense at all.
|
| Consider two service-focused business units (GTS and GBS)
| that sometimes are complementary but mostly adversarial and
| it is chaos for the customer.
|
| Spinning-off GTS (and I dare say, GBS too) is better for the
| customer and for the product business units.
| jhickok wrote:
| Containerizing IBM's software and forcing it all on OpenShift
| is such a weird move to me. When you force your customers to
| become Kubernetes admins when all they really want is some
| other solution I think you have a drastically smaller target.
|
| I think a lot of Red Hatters are tired of having the IBM
| sales force show up in their OpenShift accounts asking about
| upgrading them to Cloud Paks.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| >Back in the Thinkpad era, IBM had a lot of cool stuff going
| on. But now it seems like a shadow.
|
| I remember their stuff from the pre-Thinkpad era. Quite a
| company. Working for both a large competitor and for a small
| company that was trying to sell to them they seemed clumsy but
| still had an amazing portfolio.
|
| My guess is that they just need to merge/break-up/reconfigure
| into oblivion. Just another AT&T/HP/ITT/Polaroid/Xerox
| matt_s wrote:
| Having worked at one of those that also did business with
| IBM, I felt there was an ethos I observed in the upper ranks
| that is hard to describe. It was like they felt they were
| better than others, had large egos about their brand and had
| a certain stuffiness to them where they knew what was right
| because it was them. Like a business book/MBA club of sorts.
| Kinda hard to describe it.
|
| Anyhow I wonder if this better-than-thou, stuffy corporate
| attitude leads itself to internal re-org cycles where it
| results in no identity and no central vision, just internal
| battles.
|
| It seems like other similar size large companies, like Apple,
| can be successful so maybe their leadership doesn't show
| these character traits?
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| When I had to deal with some small tendril of IBM, I think
| the anti-trust suit was still in the works. It probably
| scarred their dealings with other companies to the same
| degree that their dominance did.
| strife25 wrote:
| This Stratechery article from 2018 nailed it for me:
| https://stratechery.com/2018/ibms-old-playbook/
| osipov wrote:
| 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 on $10Bs in revenue, and a strong services
| backlog.
|
| Many don't know that Palmisano's departure was preceded by a
| Wall Street mediated competition for the successor. IBM
| Software Group SVP, Steve Mills, was the obvious choice. The
| guy was a lifetime IBMer, intellectually superb, allegedly with
| photographic memory, effective public speaker, and with a
| proven history of leading (at the time) the 3rd largest
| software business in the world.
|
| Unfortunately, Wall Street didn't like Mills because he did not
| come across well on CNBC. The guy is chubby and doesn't look
| like a conventional CEO. So Ginny Rometty, with a claim to fame
| based on building IBM Global Business Services from on the PwC
| acquistion became the leading candidate. Ginny is "media
| friendly" and the diversity factor didn't hurt.
|
| Once Ginny came on board, leadership style changed from long-
| term to fickle and neurotic. Instead of committing to the hard
| work of building complex technology (e.g. cloud), any signs of
| technological challenges became reasons for business strategy
| changes at the top level. What started as a build decision (IBM
| SmartCloud) turned into a buy decision (Softlayer), followed by
| a build decision (IBM Bluemix), and so on.
|
| However, Ginny's biggest failure was her inability to raise
| capital on Wall Street. IBM's engineers weren't failing at
| building cloud technology because the engineers were terrible
| (some were, normal distribution rules still apply) but because
| cost cutting policies starved engineering teams though
| attrition and lack of hiring. Staffing a team meant bringing in
| internal hires w/o the right skill set or taking a gamble on
| offshore (global) resource. At the same time Google was hiring
| left and right with comparative ease (as an aside, now they are
| dealing with the consequences).
|
| Bottom line, Ginny couldn't get the capital to fund internal
| engineering efforts for the scale of the transformation needed
| to sustain IBM's success with machine learning (Watson) and
| cloud.
|
| I place the blame on Wall Street since they made the bet on
| Ginny and then left her out to dry.
| thedougd wrote:
| 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.
| 2sk21 wrote:
| 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
| josipt wrote:
| 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 all
| the rest of it. While I was there they even removed plants,
| copiers, coffee machines, televisions, pads, pencils, pens
| and everything else in sight to "save" money.
|
| The "leadership" of IBM drove the company in to the ground,
| period.
| osipov wrote:
| >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"
| throwawaygal7 wrote:
| Agree completely , the leadership was selling the farm
| piece by piece.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| 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.
| osipov wrote:
| >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.
| throwawaygal7 wrote:
| 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
| 2015 the push had stopped and everyone knew it was a failure
| to launch.
| jollybean wrote:
| "I agree completely that the change in leadership marked an
| inability to really bring WATSON to market, and some other
| products too."
|
| Watson for all it's academic glory, was kind of vapourware
| as a product.
|
| It just never really did anything materially useful. They
| did a lot of hospital trials that fizzled. Way, way over-
| promised.
|
| A little bit along the lines of ElementAI - it's hard to
| commercialized AI directly.
|
| Google et. al. do it right by incrementally improving
| things like translation, voice recognition ... it's making
| waves within academia for it's quality, but it's something
| consumers are hardly aware of.
|
| Since IBM is not a consumer company, there's only so much
| sugar and hype that Watson can provide (winning Jeopardy
| was a brilliant thing) before the rubber has to hit the
| rode.
|
| I'm not so sure if it's fair to blame a new leader for that
| one ... because I'm not sure what a realistic business
| application for Watson would be. (Maybe there are hard and
| real products, but they're probably going to be very
| context specific etc..)
|
| Building great tech is hard enough, then building great
| products on top of that - just as hard. Doing it within a
| massive multinational that makes it's money from grifting
| governments and megacorps into paying for really expensive
| services probably just is not going to work.
|
| MS, Google, FB ... they have the operational fidelity and
| product line to leverage AI internally, IBM, not so much.
|
| I don't know what the future of IBM looks like aside from
| just being another Accenture.
| 2sk21 wrote:
| 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
| jldugger wrote:
| > Google was hiring left and right with comparative ease (as
| an aside, now they are dealing with the consequences).
|
| In the five years since you left IBM in 2016, GOOG has
| tripled in value, while IBM has lost 8 percent. I think I
| know which set of consequences I'd prefer to deal with as an
| executive, shareholder, or employee.
| thedougd wrote:
| IBM once had a deep, deep bench of engineering talent and
| squandered it away. They failed to maintain the engineering
| culture while making many strategic mistakes (cloud).
|
| Starting in the late 2000s and early 10s, executives were
| crying for 'cloud skills' as part of their continuous
| 'workforce remix'. Did Amazon build AWS by hiring cloud skills?
| Of course not. You build a cloud with a wide array of talent
| including hardware, chip design, software, and systems
| engineering. IBM had all that available in house.
| geodel wrote:
| True. I remember in that big data hustle in last decade, some
| morons were claiming that Google is facing problem in hiring
| Hadoop talent. Imagine that!
| chr15p wrote:
| > The chip business looks promising. Maybe IBM should double
| down there?
|
| I always thought IBM should have bought ARM, the combination of
| IBM chip tech plus ARMs designs and Red Hat for the software
| stack would make for an amazing tech business.
| kjs3 wrote:
| This is a really nifty 'what it' to think about, but I don't
| think IBM needed ARM to have owned the world. They had/have
| POWER & PPC, and the associated development ecosystem, which
| gave them processor coverage from low-end embedded thru
| supers. They just needed to tweak their go-to-market to match
| the flexibility that ARM has given their licensees and it
| could have been a very different story.
| darksaints wrote:
| The chip business has so much potential, and they're wasting it
| all because they're so stuck in their enterprise marketing and
| sales model. There is so much demand out there for non-X86
| workstations with high performance and large core counts, and
| they won't even touch it. There is so much demand out there for
| highly scalable and energy efficient cloud professors (to the
| point that they're developing them independently), and they
| won't even touch it. Just sell the damn processors to the
| people who want them already!
| xadhominemx wrote:
| There are many very well funded companies working on merchant
| non-x86 processors. There's no reason to think IBM would be
| any better at it or that customers would prefer to buy from
| IBM.
| kjs3 wrote:
| _There's no reason to think IBM would be any better at it_
|
| I dunno...they've been building processors since the 1950s.
| nomoreplease wrote:
| When I talk to former IBMers (including a VP), it seems much of
| the outward "success" there is financial engineering, yet the
| business is crumbling in reality. Jim leaving amidst a chaotic,
| failed email migration that is impacting sales is not surprising
| mathattack wrote:
| They long ago moved from the innovation business to the share
| buyback business. It's crazy that a tech company struggles so
| much to innovate that the best use of their cash is either
| returning money to shareholders, or buying companies on their
| behalf.
| djrogers wrote:
| > leaving amidst a chaotic, failed email migration that is
| impacting sales is not surprising
|
| I'm not sure if you're trying to imply causation here, but vast
| sweeping changes like this rarely happen in a matter of days -
| it's far more likely that this has been in the works for a
| while, and the email mess is coincidental.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| It speaks to the standard of work they do at IBM.
| nomoreplease wrote:
| Coincidental yes. I was not implying causation.
| sidcool wrote:
| Can you shed some more light on email migration? What was it
| about and why did it fail?
| kwelv wrote:
| Oh
| vlovich123 wrote:
| An email migration was that important that they decided to shake
| up quite a bit of the exec team? Or was the email migration stuff
| just internal politics playing out in the news?
| rdl wrote:
| Email migration? I haven't been following IBM very closely but
| a quick google search failed me here.
| NortySpock wrote:
| https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/30/ibm_email_outage/
| rdl wrote:
| (Thanks; I was searching under the CEO's name and not IBM
| for some dumb reason; I blame lack of coffee.)
|
| Whoa.
| echelon wrote:
| 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?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Why haven 't they at least set up something temporary?_
|
| Yes, just spin up e-mail addresses for 400,000 people in
| 177 countries. No problem. Just run it on a Raspberry Pi
| in the basement.
| echelon wrote:
| Pay Google or Microsoft to do it for you.
|
| Focus on the core business competencies, of which email
| is clearly not one.
|
| Edit since I can't reply: An extended email outage isn't
| a good look either. If IBM can't run their own critical
| systems, why trust them with yours? I personally think
| making the strategic decision to outsource demonstrates
| the ability and desire to find timely solutions.
| sjm-lbm wrote:
| I suspect that IBM would see both of those as
| competitors, which honestly makes it more embarrassing.
| They can't ask for help from people that know email at
| this scale because they are too busy trying to tell the
| F500 that they know cloud at this scale.
| ivalm wrote:
| Consulting on email migration does sound like it should
| be a core competency for an enterprise tech consulting
| company...
| tyingq wrote:
| Spinning up emails for just the sales people would
| probably be worth whatever the short term cost was.
| matt_s wrote:
| 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.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| 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)
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/30/ibm_email_outage
|
| TLDR: due to a bad email migration, IBM has had massive email
| issues. Even the representative for the company had to give
| the statement to the press over the phone.
| [deleted]
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| probably not. IBM haven't been that much relevant in tech for
| years. they pivot to the cut throat consulting services while
| kind of abandoned what IBM used to be. a tech leader.
|
| Microsoft was like IBM after Bill Gates. Not a tech leader for
| many years until Microsoft pivot to Cloud computing and
| software as services.
| walrus01 wrote:
| google "IBM phoenix payroll canada" for a fine example of
| what has gone wrong.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=ibm+pho.
| ..
| momothereal wrote:
| By far the biggest software fuckup in Canada's history.
| walrus01 wrote:
| however, the therac-25 killed more people
| momothereal wrote:
| Not trying to downplay that one either, but Pheonix put
| thousands of people in major financial risk and/or ruin,
| and at least 1 suicide was attributed to it.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Nah, don't forget Target's SAP migration
| datahead wrote:
| One of my favorite lessons "learned the hard way" by
| someone else. You fundamentally cannot run a business on
| poor data practices. It will sink you before you realize
| what happened.
|
| https://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-
| can...
| markus_zhang wrote:
| How did they get so wrong...
| adventured wrote:
| Microsoft was not like IBM after Bill Gates. Not remotely
| close.
|
| Microsoft was still overwhelmingly a product company in the
| decade after Gates. It did not abandon its product-centric
| focus and switch to a service-centric business model ala IBM.
| IBM hasn't been a product heavy company in several decades at
| this point. Microsoft never stopped being product heavy.
|
| IBM liquidated its core product businesses, one after
| another. Microsoft never did that.
|
| Microsoft's sales increased dramatically during the Ballmer
| years, going from $23b in 2000 to $77b in 2013. IBM's sales
| haven't increased like that in decades (quite the opposite in
| fact, they've had a stagnant or contracting business for a
| long time).
|
| The cloud boom that Microsoft is currently enjoying, was
| planted during the Ballmer era, and it's being very
| successfully harvested during the Nadella era.
|
| Nadella is a superior CEO to Ballmer, and far superior at
| product. However Ballmer did not wreck the ship nor switch
| Microsoft to being primarily service focused in the model of
| IBM. IBM by contrast is a wrecked ship.
| rst wrote:
| IBM in its heyday (1930s through the '70s) wasn't primarily
| a service company either -- its core products were always
| data processing equipment (computers, and the plugboard-
| programmed punched card tabulators and other gear that
| preceded them). It became largely a service company in a
| pivot -- executed slowly over many years -- after losing
| dominance in the DP equipment market.
| geodel wrote:
| Exactly right! Simplistic narrative of old leader that
| could do no right and new leader that could do no wrong.
| People do love these fairy tales.
| sjg007 wrote:
| All big tech has a consulting arm. It's how you get people to
| use your software.
| slater wrote:
| He was actually let go months ago, but never received the
| e-mail /s
| awill wrote:
| pure gold
| twh270 wrote:
| Six months from now you'll find him in the basement,
| caressing his red Swingline stapler. :)
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Agnostic of actual political nonsense, an email scandal finally
| gets someone in leadership. That's the unluckiest SOB ever.
|
| PS: After an experimental physics colloquia on their campus up
| the hill, IBM Almaden offered me a _paid_ dark matter RA job when
| I was _15_. It didn 't happen thanks to sabotaging parents. Also,
| a computer scientist-programmer lady from IBM volunteered her
| time at my high-school which was really cool.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I was considering applying to Red Hat and was assured by the fact
| that IBM put Jim in charge. Now that I see this I'm reconsidering
| Red Hat as a company.
| pengaru wrote:
| My connections at RedHat say nothing has changed for them, and
| that RedHat is not IBM.
|
| But Jim leaving does make it look less likely that IBM will be
| turning into RedHat anytime soon.
|
| From what I'm told RedHat continues operating as an independent
| business unit under IBM.
|
| Edit: full disclosure; I too am considering RedHat, as I'd like
| to resume full-time work on systemd/journald in the future and
| there aren't exactly many places employing people to work on
| upstream systemd. So I may be biased in wanting to believe the
| above is true, grain of salt and all.
| decodebytes wrote:
| I am at RH right now, engineering. Things have really not
| changed. I will be honest I am a little nervous that Jim has
| left, but I think on the whole it's still a great place to
| work right now. In 3-5 years , who knows?
| dobsonj wrote:
| They do indeed feel like 2 completely different companies.
| Different hiring processes, different employment contracts,
| different cultures, different offices, different tools,
| different management structures, different benefits. The
| biggest change I've seen is that they now trade under the
| same ticker symbol.
|
| Source: former IBMer, current Red Hatter
| mathattack wrote:
| I wasn't a fan of Red Hat or the acquisition but it seems like
| they are pretty much turning it into a (small) revenue stream to
| be optimized rather than something transformational.
|
| Am I the only one who feels like IBM could be circling the drain
| like when they missed out on PCs?
| tims33 wrote:
| It won't be long until IBM starts the write-downs of the goodwill
| from the RH acquisition.
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