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 blew their budget on marketing (remember Watson on Jeopardy?)
The final straw for me was watching football with a techhy friend and a commercial for IBMs “hybrid cloud” came on. There’s some executive mulling over whether to “go to the cloud” or whether to go with on premises, and they have a eureka moment where they learn about IBM hybrid cloud and they go into a board meeting and save the day. We both just burst out laughing.
IBM doesn’t make stuff anymore. That’s the core problem.
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 apparently been doing some "cleanup" and somehow our site number got on to a list. All our servers, attached volumes, subnets, load-balancers were deleted.
My boss and I spent the next 30 hours applying terraform and rebuilding anything not automated.
Would not recommend IBM Cloud. We are moving off in next 6 months.
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 was "please get to the point of talking about your son".
Few weeks later, massive layoffs, that triggered the warn act. So now I know how IBM works, see first hand meeting, after meeting being totally worthless. I would say stay far away from anything the touch. Just be glad you could move off their platform and not stuck using their platform with their CICD ... else you would be in living hell.
It's not easy to know when is the right time to jump your old trusted provider. At the beginning of the acquisition not much happens. Things degrade slowly because employees take the burden of doing the job for two people. But nobody can be subjected to the stress for too many years.
Big corporations create nothing, only abuse the good faith of employees and the cost of moving providers of small companies. I have seen that happening in tech. When small innovative companies grew they got enough economic power to not have to innovate anymore. Purchase small good companies and drain them is the new business model.
And it's a shame, there was a time that liked IBM, and others.
Gives me the unpleasant thought of how much value is destroyed and lost in these mindless corporate acquisitions. Incentives are broadly misaligned with what we should want as a society, instead investors want a payday as well as founders, and the acquiring corporation wants a fresh coat of paint and has access to the finance that can make it happen and only hurts 10 years later. In the end promising human efforts are destroyed because the rewards for doing so are too great.
OTOH the average startup is garbage held together with duct tape that naturally falls apart without the founding team who created it. By the time of acquisition it’s usually reached a point of technical debt bankruptcy. This goes hand-in-hand with an over-heated sales team pushing hockey-stick growth that will crash back down when those brand-new customers churn at the next renewal - because the product, while nice-looking, is unmaintainable garbage.
Nice payday for the founding team and the ticking time bomb is paid for out of bigcorp’s wallet. They go on to great new things and the eventual demise of their garbage pile will be blamed on bigcorp.
Not to say that large companies don’t destroy value - they absolutely do, frequently - but that the main error they make is not being able to appraise which startups are smoke and mirrors and which are legit. The rest of us are not so great at it either.
> This goes hand-in-hand with an over-heated sales team pushing hockey-stick growth
This seems like just another argument for limiting startup acquires. Perhaps if a big exit wasn't the goal, the company would focus on more long term viability.
Anyway, I don't think they big companies care as much about whether they destroy value, as long as they destroy a potential competitor.
I see competition often being less about the startup and more about which other competing big tech company could buy the startup to consolidate an existing market strategy. I’d more charitably call it “revenue protection” to preemptively acquire them.
Startup acquisitions, in the absence of astoundingly deep due-diligence should probably be placed in portfolios where a 5:1 failure rate can be tolerated. I’m not sure how such an acquisition would be compensated.
It's not just the company internally that want (needs?) those big exits, the whole VC architecture is built around shot gunning out money for the occasional huge pay off.
I’ve sat in an all hands like that before. Literally 50k$ an hour being wasted listening to some guy we’ll only ever see once talk about his sons 18th birthday.
I think it's a power move. Nobody got up and said, "Fuck you, I have better places to be." So they win. You probably thought it was about the business or something.
Owner of the company spent half the meeting talking about how they take their grandkids anywhere in the world they want to go when they turn 16...I look at the audience paying rapt attention and I'm thinking 'this is a little odd'
Then he mentioned the 'merger of equals' and I thought 'this isn't good news'
Also been on one of those. One of the employees raised the fact salaries had been on a freeze for the last two years. Answer from VP doing the all-hands meeting: "My wife also wanted me to buy a new boat this year but I could not"
Mandating it is a power move. You can give folks the option to come back to the office if they so chose, and let others work from home if they want to.
This implies the company has set itself up to do remote work well. Not every company has, not even through the pandemic. Many are still struggling to get back to the performance they were once at.
It isn’t always a power move, even if HN wants it to be; and yes, I realize that’s an unpopular opinion here.
To be fair, it was the general manager’s bosses boss. No body was surrounded by him and by the time we were due another visit by this position, he had been promoted on.
Everyone wanted to be on Softlayer for a time. It was THE hosting provider. I don’t know if they where any good, but the got great press coverage.
Two years ago I had to help a customer debug some weird nginx behaviour, resulting in their traffic spiking at ten times the expected rate. The IBM/Softlayer VPN required that I used Internet Explorer, but it still failed to work. We spend three month with IBM and IBM Cloud consultants to make it NOT work.
IBM destroy everything it buys. They have POWER, their mainframes and associated software left. How that keeps them afloat is a mystery.
Softlayer was solid at providing colo and dedicated servers. But they were never really architected with the cloud in mind. The pivot to cloud came later on. I always wonder why IBM didn't buy a provider like Linode.
Softlayer had the idea of API-driven bare-metal server hosting (as opposed to ticket-driven or phone-call-driven) early on, which was a big differentiator for a while. But AWS came along with an even more extreme version of API-driven hosting and they never caught up.
As an example, most network or server changes you made through the API resulted in an automated email saying your sales representative would be in touch about your order, followed a minute later by an automated email saying the change was done at $0 charge.
I stopped using Softlayer after IBM took over. I still get emails about the daily "incidents" in "IBM Cloud", as well as monthly billing notices for my $0 bill. I don't know my "IBM Id" or "Softlayer Id" to log in any more as it's been almost a decade, so I can't unsubscribe from any of it.
Relationship messages (like incident reports and bills) aren't typically covered by the CAN SPAM Act, but that law's never stopped anyone anyway. I don't have enough fingers to count the number of daily commercial emails from otherwise respectable US businesses that don't include a mailing address or don't honor opt-out requests. Cold sales mails from tech startups are a big offender...
We're a pretty small org, and not sure we have the organizational heft or resources to do so. That being said, the $1k discount they gave us for Nov based on the broken SLA (resources down) was kind of a slap in the face. We had our minimal core services up in 16hrs, but recorded about 100-120 internal engineering hours for config, testing, and other fallout +1 month.
When we opened the initial ticket, the IBM engineer kept saying "you should ask X why they deleted your stuff". Eventually after attaching the LinkedIn page for the IBM SRE in the audit logs, they realized something was screwed up on their side.
For breach of contract and negligence, IBM were successfully sued, and then banned from all future projects, by the Queensland government in 2013. [0] Which sets you up with a nice precedent and set of documents to see their angle of attack.
> IBM will not be allowed to enter any new contracts with the State Government until it improves its governance and contracting practices.
With that ban _still live today_, it astonishes me that any corporation would trust the organisation to actually carry through with their obligations. You have to really, really, royally screw up for a government body to consider you anathema.
The old adage of "No one was ever fired for hiring IBM" is no longer true or reasonable.
> For breach of contract and negligence, IBM were successfully sued, and then banned from all future projects, by the Queensland government in 2013. [0] Which sets you up with a nice precedent and set of documents to see their angle of attack.
I mean, yes, but also think about how long a government can afford to have their lawyers pursue a case like that. If you don't have those kind of resources, it's a lot riskier.
They also have a very significant interest in pursuing it, in that they often have to follow procurement rules that prevent them from excluding vendors without good reason. If you think a vendor will be a problem in the future, getting a legal judgement in place may sometimes be necessary to save a lot of grief that a private company can avoid by just privately and quietly blacklisting the vendor in question.
In civilised lands the loser has to reimburse the winner's legal costs, so at no cost. If you don't live in civilised lands, well you have other problems.
I'm not sure that is as civilized as you think it is. Loser pays discourages any small company or individual from suing because the cost is too great if they lose.
Even AWS contracts are vague enough to not make this a slam dunk. They pretty much explicitly say if you don’t store stuff in multiple regions you are going to take outages/data loss.
Does your civilized legal system also force the inevitable loser to front your legal fees while the case is ongoing? Or is it possible the plaintiff with deeper pockets can just stretch things out until the legal system has bled you dry and you must withdraw?
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 tool for managing cases at a law firm, or some custom supply chain kludge -- the 99% of other "boring" software -- and I happen to know nothing about technology, who do I turn to?
IBM isn't a bad choice. It's a major step up from Indian firms in terms of both price and quality. It has significant in-house technology to leverage. It's a safe choice. It will usually do better than in-house IT.
I recently evaluated the business of a company which builds ships. They developed software in-house with an IT staff who weren't qualified to tie their own shoelaces. They had huge military contracts. They didn't subcontract to IBM, but it wouldn't have been a bad choice.
> IBM isn't a bad choice. It's a major step up from Indian firms in terms of both price and quality. It has significant in-house technology to leverage. It's a safe choice. It will usually do better than in-house IT.
Having been there, I can say that IBM is no different than the other Indian tech firms like Infosys, Wipro, HCL and other. Infact, there is a rotating door of employees among IBM and other Indian firms.
1. Since the last 5 years, IBM has more employees in India than in the US or any other country [1]
2. Secondly IBM pays more that the Indian companies in India to poach employees but shortchange their US counterparts. [2]
Infact, the only difference between IBM and other firms is that the initial sales procoess is handled by American counterparts. Once the sales piece is done and the actual project starts, it is replaced by the offshore team.
Honestly, I’m not sure IBM is a step up from the Indian firms. It’s certainly more expensive (like, ridiculously so) for not much more quality, if any.
Is it? Really? No. In fact it's not. Name one Indian company that ever reached 1/10th of what ibm had so that it's a candidate for seeing it on the way down.
A serious insult because it'd be much more true would be to look at it's OD, culture and demise since Gerstner. Gerstner wasn't happy with a lot of IBM slop, paper pushers, and corporate BS either. That'd keep it on track rather than spurious comparisons.
Gerstner layed of somewhere around 20% of work force, sold off tons of ibm art, real estate etc because IBM was lost ... And losing money. That says something. Spurious comparisons don't.
Labeling IBM bad because it out sources to India is a vieled insult to indians and it's culture I guess. If that's the position -- not mine --- have the galiteantry and courage to just say so.
I'm reminded of the Futurama line: do you idiots where you're from? Nobody nowhere can say no to that. American culture, OD, and common sense when it's not losing money, playing golf, splashing around shareholder cash on art or tieing up innovation in BS (all of which IBM did pre Gerstner and was called out for) expects problems fixed, brings out the best in all comers, and expects comers to be value add. Thosr that cant play that game are out.
Regrettably this has one dark corner. Management isnt so good at overseeing itself. So in really bad situations they are good at shifting blame. Well nobody said it'd be easy. Let's start by not gossiping however.
> Name one Indian company that ever reached 1/10th of what ibm had so that it's a candidate for seeing it on the way down.
I'm not sure what your point is here, but based on Forbes 2000 for 2020 via Wikipedia [1], by market cap Tata Consultancy Services and Reliance are both larger than IBM. Both have grown faster than IBM since 2020. In terms of companies overall a number of other Indian companies are larger than IBM.
If you look at infotech alone, Tata Consultancy Services is the one bigger than IBM, and Infosys (>50% of IBM market cap), HCL Technologies and Wipro are all larger than 1/10th of IBM.
2020? Big deal. IBM has been around for serious time. Like I said show me an Indian company that was a tech giant for analysis on the way down. No doubt IBM has got work to do. But tata ain't no ibm. Furthermore my take stands up for Indian know how not crapping on it as others have done here. It's just that indian companies nowhere near have ibm corporate legacy. As for ibm: it wouldn't kill you to try to innovate again not react and buy innovation even if Watson was a bust
Tata is nearly half a century older than IBM. IBM is older than the TCS subsidiary, sure - TCS is "only" 54 years old. But I have no idea why that matters to your argument as it's still not clear to me why you were making the comparison.
That said, IBM does today have more employees in India than in the US, and IBMs current CEO is Indian-American, born in India and educated in part at an IIT so I can see why some would describe it that way. To me at least there's no value judgement - positive or negative - attached to that. It seems like you took offence at the comparison of IBM to an Indian company, and I can see why you'd think so in context, but I don't see why that justifies downplaying the success of companies like TCS.
> Like I said show me an Indian company that was a tech giant for analysis on the way down.
I still have no idea what you intend this to mean. TCS is a tech giant. It's the largest IT service company in the world.
As for Tata being no IBM, you're right, Tata Group is older and several times the size of IBM. The Tata Consultancy Services subsidiary alone is larger than IBM, and Tata as a whole employs about twice as many people as IBM, most in TCS. IBMs original business was thematically closer to what they still do today, I guess, but only marginally.
>> Like I said show me an Indian company that was a tech giant for analysis on the way down.
>I still have no idea what you intend this to mean. TCS is a tech giant. It's the largest IT service company in the world.
What is so tough here understand here? I've done IT for 30 years. I don't think I've used a gadget, O/S, compiler, cloud resource, dev-ops, or distributed algo from Tata once. IBM? All day long. I consulted at AT&T ... man the number of things they made I used was insane.
Moreover, given time all large companies cycle between running on all 8 cylinders to periods where marketing, paper pushers, corporate culture BS, losing contact with customers and customer satisfaction, poor quality erode the top/bottom line, lead to a loss of market power, pricing power, and so on.
Tata, assuming it ever had the towering heights IBM hit on all fronts, may be big now. But wait around long enough and Tata like most large human organizations will fall from grace too. And I bet, at it's core, outsourcing will not be found to be root-cause; related perhaps but certainly blaming the outsiders isn't wisdom. So as I said, then re-said, and say again show me one of those Indian companies *who are on a down cycle now*. The way I have contextualized it here makes for a relevant comparison.
While I'm at it: I'll say again unlike posters earlier up, I refuse to crap on IBM because it out-sources to Indian companies. Like anywhere some Indian companies suck. Some don't. Some may be on a high cycle like Tata. Those in the US doing the outsourcing maybe already sucked before outsourcing began. It's those kinds of spurious insults which are not appropriate and not my position.
This assumes that IBM's core business is the same as their Services business. I doubt they have any overlap. They got onto the bandwagon after seeing how successful some of the early Indian services companies were (in terms of revenue) such as Infosys, Wipro, and TCS.
I would put the IT services business of Accenture, Cap Gemini, and IBM in the same bucket as the rest of the Indian firms.
There is a world of difference between a US ship building company outsourcing to India and a US tech firm intermediating that transaction:
- A US intermediator can know the climate in India and navigate the cultural differences because they do this day in day out.
- A US tech company can properly vet whom they're subcontracting to because they have engineers in-house
- A US tech company will have a contract in US jurisdiction. If there is e.g. a data leak, there is liability through US courts. A step down from that, a US company can have US-based oversight and escalation mechanisms
- Social networks and relationships matter too. If you're working with Bob from the golf course, and his company messes up, you'll see Bob again next month at the golf course and chew him out.
... and so on.
I'm not suggesting you or I (personally) should subcontract through IBM, but for a US-based non-tech firm, it can make a lot of sense.
To flip this around, whom would you rather hire to do your accounting (presuming you're not an accountant and know nothing about accounting):
- A US company which outsources to India
- A random company in India
I would go for the former, since I know there would be liability if they messed up, and they'd make sure the US tax code was properly complied with. There's nothing wrong with the latter, but I'd have no way to vet them, and if they messed up, no recourse.
My stepdad manages a team in IT for a very large, very slow company in the banking/financial sector. The decisions about what software and hosting solutions they'll use are made by execs at the upper echelons, probably over games of golf by people who don't know that much. They just know, "I really like Jim over at IBM, he's got a real swagger to his step" and "other big companies are using them" and "hell they just bought a Super Bowl commercial." So a $2M deal gets done, and IBM stays in business.
I spent 10 years at a small (<80 people) CX company that was full of intelligent, motivated employees. We were smart and quick and lean and did very good work. But we never dragged in big deals because no one at the company had that swagger/access to high-levels. The scenario you describe is dumb and ruinous and, unfortunately, true.
Big deals can really put a company in danger. If the company you work with closes or cuts the deal or whatever you could loose half your revenue. On top of that big clients can be really needy especially dinosaurs companies that aren’t nimble. They take forever to pay, have lots of meetings and unreasonable expectations and expect lots of free stuff and service because they are incapable of processing Non standard invoices due to internal politics. It’s a mixed bag to deal with the big guys
I saw this play out first hand: a local digital agency run by a friend essentially ended up "captured" by a major player in the aerospace industry, to the point that 65-75% of their business came from $BIGCO. They grew by 100%+, had employees flying all over the world to set up for trade shows, and were making money by the truckload.
Then Covid hit, nobody wanted to fly, and $BIGCO took an earnings haircut and decided to cut back. My friend had to let dozens of people go. It ended up costing him his company because he'd neglected bringing other work into the pipeline.
Yep that’s super dangerous especially cyclical industry like aerospace. Plus aerospace companies are notorious for paying late are having unreasonable demands.
Coworker dad went from being a millionaire to living in a truck this way too.
While that's true, the execs who make these decisions usually don't care about the actual implementation. Once the deal is done, it falls on their "IT division". And two things happen: Jim over at IBM still pampers the exec with a dinner or two. And the exec also suspects that some, if not most, of the problems are with his IT team.
Big companies have very strong anti kickback rules. You can get around them through board level connections but not much sort of That. Nobody Is risking 500k a year compensation over a dinner or 2.
100% agree. I know many capable developers who will never do anything other than close tickets because they cannot build relationships. Some of them do not even understand why building a relationship might be fruitful.
Big corps tend not to do deals with small corps. They don't want the small corp to become dependent on them. Simple contract termination becomes costly and litigious otherwise.
I've worked as a sales engineer/architect in teams selling to people like your stepdad's execs for almost a decade. I can 100% guarantee the sales reps and their leadership constantly practice "swagger" and remind each other of its importance. It's hilarious.
I think what many people don't realise is the insane amount of research that is being done at IBM. In lots of areas, I know of quantum computing, silicon photonics, process development for integrated circuits, processors... They still file the most patents per year in the world by quite a margin (9000, the only one being remotely close is Samsung at 6000, for comparison apple and MS have 3000) and while I am not a big fan of patents, I do realise that one has to do significant research for getting this amount.
They probably could just run much of the business just on the licencing fees they get. If you think they are not doing anything you're likely not their target customer.
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 they don't).
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.
I did a similar year long migration off Oracle. What helped were all the automated integration tests that had been built previously. It made it so much easier to verify that everything would work after the migration.
Oracle is also arcane, buggy and poorly documented (the buggy really surprised me when I first started using it). And there are much less resources online compared to the other big databases.
I’m not sure about the architecture, but airline booking is very complex. You basically need to support a traveling salesman algorithm. It’s also one of the original use cases for large scale computers. The Sabre airline booking program dates back to the 60’s so it’s also very legacy. The Arstechnica article (below) has a good history of the original military program and how it helped to spin out airline booking.
Modernization for these systems was probably long overdue.
I recall talking to people who worked at a company that competed w/ Sabere/IBM
There was a project they did not want to do. To avoid saying "no" and risking the relationship they quoted what they thought was an outrageous price, expecting to loose. The customer said yes. They had underestimated how much IBM had been gouging them for so long.
It's kind of similar in some ways to the traveling salesman problem. Which is not considered np-hard.
"How do you get to tokyo from paris", the cheapest, the shortest time, the least layovers, add a stop in X, etc. Not that easy.
Then you have to remember all the stuff under the hood like how are you caching all that information, how do you actually register the sales of all those tickets. Are they in your flight alliance? Are they goign through your regional airline systems too?
I would never want to touch that stuff. Way too hard. Way too many legacy systems powering it too, probably.
Every single airline they ingest probably has a phone book sized list of special cases and edge conditions that are distinct and unique. Multiply that by every airline on the platform and every consumer of the dataset and yeah… it’s incredibly complex.
Not to mention the uptime requirements and other SLAs in place (which probably are all different for each contract they sign)… yup. It’s probably a monster.
They make money on those who have more than they know what to do with.
Case in point: I spent six months in a project, which at its peak had about forty people working on it. Eventually it was scrapped and replaced with a solution from IBM, which in turn ended up... not being used at all.
Overall it was a hilarious waste of everyone's time, but somehow that was okay.
Similar. Worked on a project where there were 50+ contractors to automate simple biz workflows. Run that for a few years @ their rates and you'll see how much enterprises spend on relatively simple software projects.
I was part of that acquisition. To be fair, Weather Channel was already running Weather Underground into the ground when they acquired it first. IBM just came in and helped them finished the job.
A huge part of it was the incompetence with which IBM pushed us to use Watson modules in our products, which I could see 6 years ago were worse than open source AI options and had no application to Weather Underground's services. They were basically toy projects being advertised as ground-breaking AI. I'm not surprised at all to see Watson finally collapsing under the weight of its vacuous claims.
>> They were basically toy projects being advertised as ground-breaking AI.
They were media events that lead to powerful media events, which in turn lead to investors pumping money into the stock price. Shareholder value is the only real profit. Watson being on Jeopardy no doubt garnered investment dollars from thousands of wealthy retirees. Those toy projects earned their keep many times over.
I don't mean to inject cryptocurrency cynicism & NFT skepticism into this discussion about IBM Watson...
But as someone who doesn't know the tech, but worked in the media side as a vendor at the tail end making marketing materials for IBM during their "Internet of Things" craze, I couldn't help but feel, as a laymen, so excited at what IoT (and other crazy developments like Watson) could be, because apparently IBM at the time was hitting up a buncha different vendors and just blanketing a certain sector of the marketing industry with jobs. Any colleagues I talked to were on some IBM marketing job or another.
Fast forward to about 7 years later, and I still have no clue what IoT is or does, but I sure saw a buncha marketing material flood mainstream media for a minute, with IBM saying it'd be revolutionary!
Just makes me think about web3/ crypto/ NFT's, how it's coming down hard with media campaigns, claims, yada yada. Definitely seems about hype & optics, just like IBM in their IoT media carpet bombing era.
This is a great insight. Even if execs know $x billions will be wasted on such trendy projects (toy projects to those who know what’s going on), they will still go and spend $x billions. Why? Since it keeps the market cap going up. This positive delta in the market cap is almost 10 times more than $x billions.
It is even worse than it looks considering the opportunity cost of not sticking the money in basically risk free and cost free SP500 ETFs. Even Warren Buffett took a huge bath on IBM.
They completely destroyed the iPhone app. It’s been, what, more than a year at least and the new version’s hourly forecast still shows the beginning of the day (1am) even if you look at it at 7pm. So many things about that app that made it great got ripped out.
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 never hear about what they're doing.
I'll agree they seem to have lost their way. Its a shame really. They did some good things: I remember a lot of the engineers there would travel to schools and promote engineering careers.
Extremely reliable, and extremely good at what they do.
They sure are expensive.
A lot more companies should adopt them.
Yet its going the way.
They run at scale at a lot of companies.
AS/400 / iSeries was awesome at least in the beginning.
I think it may be discontinued now.
Those machines were extremely reliable and well made.
Often companies who had bought one had no idea where it was.
Someone had set it up for them 7 years ago and after that nobody
paid attention.
Some places were better and did proper backups.
Which means stuff the right tape of a rotation into the slot.
They would also call home to tell IBM of a proper that is developing
and they would send a tech out to switch the parts prior to anyone
using it had any problem.
(and that is when the machines were sometimes hard to find.
One was buried in a closet, with tons of paper cases, paper archives.
stack buttom up to the floor.
I wish there was a way to learn mainframes that were accessible to mere mortals. Some toying around with a (almost certainly illicit) emulated copy of z/OS revealed an extremely complex, no doubt powerful, but entirely alien system that I'd have loved to get my head around, but alas, I could find no good resources.
They also do a lot of reselling. They will pitch some sort of cyber security upgrade to their client and after the client signs they will ask Akamai to onboard that client
That was the biggest problem. It wasn’t quite possible yet, at least with how IBM wanted to use it. Rometty and her executives believed their own marketing hype. It’s why, billions of dollars later, Watson Health failed because it couldn’t make better cancer treatment decisions. Watson Talent Management failed because it couldn’t make better hiring decisions. The tech was misused.
As a worker drone who has spent my career in Sector 7G, I'm continually amazed at how many business decisions seem to be based on these "magic" quadrants. We spend 12 months building a capable and flexible infrastructure on Product A, only to have our management ask us why we haven't moved everything on to Product B, which is slightly closer to the top-right corner in the magic quadrant.
I always answer, "Sure, we could, if you're fine with not other progress getting made towards your business objectives for 6 months."
A former employer tried for years to get onto the magic quadrant, and never succeeded. Until they started paying gartner for access to their “specialist knowledge”, and suddenly they were on the magic quadrant … in the lower left, with gartner pushing them to pay more to get better access.
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.
Hmm... maybe the magic in magic quadrants is in how they attract the sorts of people that will act on the information conveyed by the grid. Way better than an Ouija board for IT recommendations. Ouija is very hit and miss, really depends on what spirit you get connected with. Magic quadrants just work.
They are in the audit business. Large companies have pockets where outsourced engineering teams have installed or forgotten to delete their outmoded software. They send in an audit team, and come up with a massive payment due. Then they negotiate with their “customers” to have them buy new software for approximately half the cost of audit payment. IBM gets new revenue (and new products to audit) and companies pat themselves on the back for averting disaster. And the new software never gets used.
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
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.
The problem is infinitely printable FIAT, controlled by corrupt and incompetent politicians that is very slow and very expensive to to transact overseas and mutable.
The solution is 100x faster, cheaper, more secure, immutable, less prone to fraud and limited in supply.
Those are problems in theory, but I don’t think most people are concerned or affected by them. I’m certainly not.
I never need to transfer money quickly between accounts — it’s never once been a problem to wait a couple days. And sure there are real economic problems with printing money, but again, the government does a decent enough job at keeping the dollar stable that it doesn’t affect me.
And there’s the fact that the US gov has tons of power to maintain the validity of the fiat dollar through legislation, and as a backup they have the use of force through police and jail (in the case of tax evasion, or avoiding the laws). Then there are international alliances, and there’s the largest military in the world also with a strong interest in maintaining the dollar’s value.
So I’m not worried about the value of the US dollar in the long term — at least I certainly trust it more than a purely technical solution with none of the US Gov benefits.
Faster: I don’t have any problem with speed of USD transactions. In fact, most transactions are faster than crypto via credit cards or cash.
Cheaper: there are $0 transaction fees for cash, and low fees for credit.
Secure: US laws do a decent enough job
Fraud: crypto exchanges get hacked and there is often no recourse — if my credit card is stolen, there are laws that protect me
Limited supply: by definition, that makes the currency deflationary, which is horrible for a growing economy. And it’s obvious in bitcoin. Nobody spends money today if it’ll be worth more tomorrow — that’s why everyone just buys and holds bitcoin as an investment, not uses it as a currency
You’re saying that you trust the government a lot in making sure the dollar value stays stale, however, it has lost 30% or more since the start of the pandemic if you look at price increases of commodities, so you are already very wrong.
It might not matter to you that sending cross border transactions have very high fees, because you live in a first world country and are rich, but 99% of the world aren’t as rich as you.
They have a product called Hyperledger Fabric that is marketed as an enterprise-scale permissioned-blockchain. I’ve tried to get it working before with some free credits and couldn’t figure it out.
IBM identified back in the 70s their core asset and were very explicit about what it was. "No one gets fired for buying IBM." Their key strategy since then has been to monetize this asset in a variety of creative, and mainly very effective ways.
Thinkpads were a great example of this. Laptops which promised decent quality and support for a high price. When the laptop market was demystified and commodified, IBM correctly got out of it - for a decent price.
If some random start-up, or even Google, had built Watson, it would have correctly been seen as a gimmick. Instead it sold literally billions of software consulting to people who thought they needed AI but actually just needed a search box with dynamic autosuggestion. Would you rather get some junior guy to hack something together using open source tools, or would you rather pay IBM 50 times as much? If you chose the former, you're simply not in the target market.
The hybrid cloud is exactly the same game - as is made quite clear in that ad, it's pitched at middle management who don't want to look like chumps for ignoring the cloud, but don't want to fuck up by moving to it.
Reputation is a difficult asset to monetize - effectively you make money from it by degrading and then destroying it. After all, if you carry living up to your good reputation, you're not extracting any advantage from it. IBM can't sell their reputation or their name to the highest bidder. All they can do is keep trawling for business lines where it gives them a comparative advantage.
It's easy to see this as unscrupulous - but their customers genuinely do get a benefit from the confidence they have in IBM.
I understand why you're saying this. I have no idea either. However, open their 10-K and you'll find out how they make money. In fact, while their revenue and profits are declining, they still make more than $70B in revenue a year with a profit of about $4-5B, so their ability to stay in business is higher than many tech companies that are not profitable.
IBM is old, it's good and bad (probably not the first time they made bad decisions). Let's see if they can wash off the last decade or two that were full of mistakes.
They still do stuff but it's hard research and niche so business wise it won't make them short term success. You mention power but they also have a good hand in Quantum Computing.
I'm a Red Hatter, and I'm not sure what they mean either. I obviously only know my own little corner of engineering, but I've seen no signs whatsoever of being gutted. From where I stand, it's just a change of ownership that, at least for now, is completely transparent on the ground. I expect the situation to continue for as long as Red Hat keeps making money.
They haven't. I have no doubt that IBM has historically mishandled a great many acquisitions but thus far I haven't seen any changes that feel pushed by IBM.
Source: I work at Red Hat.
It's a bit of a strange comment considering it blames IBM for Lenovo's management of the Thinkpad line and a commercial that they later realized (but still haven't corrected themselves) was actually an HPE commercial [0].
Before IBM purchase: Travel to clients, build and/or fix their things, suggest improvements.
After IBM purchase: Travel to clients, build and/or fix their things, suggest improvements.
At least from my side of Red Hat I've experienced zero changes in how I go about my work. In fact, my schedule is even more packed now, we can barely keep up with the demand. As far as I can tell IBM has left us alone to do our thing. Maybe it's different for other departments.
Longtime Red Hatter here (in a non-engineering role). No "gutting" has taken place whatsoever. Thus far IBM has had an almost entirely hands-off, do-things-your-way, noninterference-in-internal-affairs sort of approach to Red Hat. That's not to say Red Hat hasn't had challenges but those likely would have developed even if it had remained independent.
That's a joke. If you read that drivel prepared for the stock market, you would come away thinking IBM is the biggest Cloud operator in the world. In reality of course they have just rebranded all kind of cash flow streams as "cloud" - because they know "cloud" will make the stock go up whereas "mainframe" makes it go down.
They also provide mainframe-based Linux VMs for clients that require the encryption technology built into those machines. If you need to give certain assurances by law or contract, they may be a good option. Apart from that, if you need on-demand VMs for IBM i or AIX, they are one of your only options.
IBM has acceptable tape systems.
Would be nice if they did not keep changing tape buffer sizes/times and other conditions without properly advertising the changes, but LTO is bad at scale so they have that going for them.
Another insult to the injury: they were doing e-commerce with WebSphere Commerce series as early as 1998, yet they could not even go beyond the limited presentation-controller-db tiered architecture, and could never imagine something like shopify.
They have a very big consultancy business. Probably has a much better brand name than say Tata consulting. Plus their products like db2, websphere or openshift have thousands of businesses locked in.
I don't think they do either, judging by my experience working there as an upper-level-support technician 15 years ago.
It seemed like the organization was book-ended with decent brains: engineers and front-line managers were decent to fantastic, and the upper-management seemed to be decent at the time. However, both ends seemed to be choking to death on a hundred layers of middle management. 7 years after Office Space was released and I actually had three(3) managers. Three! I had a technical manager with whom I had bi-weekly meetings where we talked about nothing, a non-technical manager with whom I had monthly meetings where we talked about nothing, and the head of my department who was the only one who meaningfully managed me in any way. (And he was absolutely fantastic.)
For example— they made some big announcements about their impending migration from windows to linux for everybody from admin assistants to sales to developers. Exciting! I loved that linux was getting more professional credibility, and my product ran on Solaris, so having a local UNIX environment would reduce some of the cognitive load for networking, scripting, etc. etc. There was no internal mandate to start the migration yet, but I was too eager to wait. I found the official image on the intranet and started writing documentation for my coworkers. It was pretty smooth! The complex GUI apps like the Lotus suite worked great! Well, as great as they did on windows, anyway. The installer was quite polished! I was excited!
I had one more thing to install— the ancient, internal defect and ticket tracking clients used by every technical worker, product designer, all of their managers, etc. Neither the intranet page for the clients nor the Linux image docs had any info. Hours later, I found a months-old internal note EoLing the Linux port, directing people to use the obtuse CLI instead. No problem— we're all technical people here, right? Problem. The API used by the GUI client supported necessary functionality the CLI didn't. That alone rendered the Linux initiative dead-in-the-water for most technical workers who'd benefit most.
I'm sure the manager who canned the Linux client was solving a very real problem, but a) a decision directly affecting company-wide strategy getting lost in the ether, and b) nobody checking to see if these big overtures were even basically feasible, embodies their organizational shortcomings. (I might have gotten some of the details wrong— it was a long time ago— but you get the gist.)
That's almost certainly why they're getting sued for purportedly blatant age discrimination, too. Managers in the middle with too much sway to have that little top-level visibility solving their problems using means that end up screwing lots of people.
That they style themselves as a technology-focused business consulting company rather than just a tech company is pretty rich.
I don’t think “doing cool engineering” has anywhere near as much to do with staying in business than you think it does. And IBM of all tech companies is the one that always was more about suits and sales than technology.
The tech sector prints money. Large companies can leech off past heroics built by former employees for decades, even if the current employees are incompetent. A zombie company if you will.
HPE is kind of even more baffling. They make generic servers while, at least, IBM can sell you a brand new POWER 10 (running AIX, Linux or IBM i) or a mainframe. A new generation of mainframes is due this year and the crazy cache architectures they have shown last year is quite unique.
Thanks! I think the commercial is ok, at least it makes an attempt to explain what the product is. The IBM "hybrid cloud" commercials I found on youtube were just awful.
There's still a phenomenon in advertising where it increases your awareness of a category, but you don't correctly ascribe it to the correct advertiser in that category. So funnily enough, I could still see someone going to IBM based on this ad.
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 blew their budget on marketing (remember Watson on Jeopardy?)
The final straw for me was watching football with a techhy friend and a commercial for IBMs “hybrid cloud” came on. There’s some executive mulling over whether to “go to the cloud” or whether to go with on premises, and they have a eureka moment where they learn about IBM hybrid cloud and they go into a board meeting and save the day. We both just burst out laughing.
IBM doesn’t make stuff anymore. That’s the core problem.