IBM isn't sinking. It is quite large, nearly 400,000 employees. If they laid off 10% of their workforce it would be like a bit more than 1 and a half Facebooks ceased to exist but it would be a drop in the bucket at IBM.
What they are is slow moving and hidebound. I think that at some level they understand that, and at other levels they don't. They have an amazing asset in their labs where they can put 1,000 of some of the smartest people you might ever hope to meet on to a problem pretty much instantly.
In my short time with them post acquisition I found a company that was very slowly losing its calcified husk and becoming more agile. It had some blind spots but when you replace enough people that can be fixed. As Gerstner showed in the 90's, as Satella is showing at Microsoft, what Welch showed at GE. Put the right leadership team in place and you can do amazing things with that power.
It's all contractors being sub contracted to other companies. If they laid off 10% of their workers overnight it wouldn't matter because it's the normal cycle of contracting.
There can be no growth because contractors don't scale. They bring a fix percentage of their day rate.
There could be some products with great people lost in a corner of IBM. However, they will remain a negligible fraction of the company and they won't have the power to turn it around.
If AWS/Microsoft makes a new product or service, they can roll out instantly everywhere and capture clients. If IBM does something new, they couldn't begin to sell it, they'd sell you a contractor.
> There can be no growth because contractors don't scale.
Except of course that when you employ 300K of them it does scale. The mistake many software people make is that only software scales, but IBM (and others) has successfully built a scalable model around consulting.
> Put the right leadership team in place and you can do amazing things with that power.
Sure, but that's the thing: IBM doesn't have the right leadership team in place, and hasn't since Gerstner left. It shows no sign of having learnt from its mistakes.
Fundamentally, IBM is a sales company, not a technical company. For a long, long time its marketing department was able to sell the fiction that it was a technical company, and use that reputation to sell, but folks realise now that it's just not.
As a recent IBM Hire...one of the first in about 30 years for my role and definitely the first for my region ever I am stoked to work for IBM. Me being hired quite literally wiped about 5 companies contracts out of my region for certain hardware roles...which they deserved because they provided terrible service. IBM is certainly becoming more agile...the one thing I am learning about my role within the company...is that change is a constant for the company.
What they are is slow moving and hidebound. I think that at some level they understand that, and at other levels they don't. They have an amazing asset in their labs where they can put 1,000 of some of the smartest people you might ever hope to meet on to a problem pretty much instantly.
In my short time with them post acquisition I found a company that was very slowly losing its calcified husk and becoming more agile. It had some blind spots but when you replace enough people that can be fixed. As Gerstner showed in the 90's, as Satella is showing at Microsoft, what Welch showed at GE. Put the right leadership team in place and you can do amazing things with that power.