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IBM is a dying giant, I've seen it languishing for years. Their massive screw up was a decade ago when they decided shareholder value was more important than ha
by slackingoff2017 9y ago
IBM is a dying giant, I've seen it languishing for years. Their massive screw up was a decade ago when they decided shareholder value was more important than having good engineers. They've since gutted their R&D departments and all that's left are duds and underpaid undereducated consultants rented from places like Accenture.
The only good thing to come out of IBM in years is their Hyperscan regex library and unsurprisingly they don't market it at all or build practical applications with it
- bsg75 9y agoThe same Hyperscan as here? https://github.com/01org/hyperscan https://github.com/01org/hyperscan Project homepage suggests this is an Intel project.
- thealfreds 9y agoAlso the LICENSE > Hyperscan is licensed under the BSD License. > Copyright (c) 2015, Intel Corporation
- KingMob 9y agoThe Hyperscan website (https://01.org/hyperscan https://01.org/hyperscan) says it was built by Sensory Networks Inc, and then bought by and released as open source by Intel. No mention of IBM. Are you thinking of something else?
- slackingoff2017 9y agoOops, yeah. They haven't produced anything then :)
- p1esk 9y agoJeopardy, TrueNorth?
- WalterBright 9y agoIn the 80's IBM was an unstoppable juggernaut. In the 90's it was Microsoft. Then Apple. Now Google/Amazon. Conventional wisdom is that, in a free market, a single corporation will grow to rule everything. But that never seems to pan out. Part of the reason is that the larger an organization gets, the more inefficient and bureaucratic it gets, the less it is able to adapt. See "The Innovator's Dilemma", a book everyone interested in business should read.
- ethbro 9y ago+Baidu/Alibaba
- pducks32 9y agoI’ve never used either in my life and have spent a ton of time in Africa, the US, Ireland, and England. 3 continents.
- paganel 9y ago>3 continents. Just today I had a 10-minute chat with one of my colleagues from marketing about AliExpress. I live and work in Eastern Europe, and almost all the people who do online sales rely on a Chinese company like AliExpress. Some of those people were using the UK as their source of buying merchandise until a couple of years ago, not anymore, it's all China now. The US (and the UK&Ireland) are losing big on this because Amazon's stock-price is blinding them. IMHO Amazon is going to hit a wall in terms of online sales sooner rather than later and the only thing that will be left to save them will be AWS.
- solotronics 9y agoif you work or visit China you basically must use WeChat, Alipay, and Baidu. the great firewall blocks the competition and everyone in China uses the homegrown equivalents.
- aphextron 9y agoOddly enough Microsoft is the only company I can see bucking this trend right now. The other big guys youve mentioned have essentially slumped down into their respective markets and drawn up battle lines, whereas MS really seems to be pushing into new territory. I wouldnt be surprised to see them come back into mobile with a Surface phone that gives Apple a run for their money.
- kjs3 9y agoI've heard that IBM is a dying giant for 30 years. Wake me up when it's a reality.
- adventured 9y ago> Their massive screw up was a decade ago when they decided shareholder value was more important than having good engineers. IBM's management believed shareholder value was important, in about the same way Bernie Madoff believed his investor's well-being was important. Which is to say, not at all in actuality. IBM's management was negligent in regards to shareholder value in almost every way possible. Believing shareholder value was so important, would require simultaneously believing having good engineers is critical. The management decided to fleece the company for their own near-term benefit, to the detriment of shareholder value (which is now being represented in the stock price accordingly, and it'll get much worse, soon).
- jameslk 9y agoDying? How so? Lots of companies have their legacy IT infrastructure built on top of IBM's mainframes and products. Who's innovating fast enough to provide a compelling enough reason to replace all that infrastructure? Perhaps IBM is just stable and uninteresting, like most blue chip companies.
- icc97 9y agoIBM have been what seems like this bureaucratic monstrosity ever since the started. But that was back in the 60s. I appreciate their perseverance if nothing else. If you look at the fate of companies like Nokia, IBM has some how managed to avoid this what has been meteoric shifts in their business. Plus competition is always good. Watson itself clearly was a great product and a big step in the development of AI. Just because the marketing department is making a mess of things shouldn't take away from the work that was done on Watson in the first place.
- rsj_hn 9y agoIt's not just dying, it's shedding customers. The only reason the stock price isn't in free-fall is because it's cutting costs rapidly via outsourcing and also buying back shares. IBM Real(1) annual Revenue (in billions of 2016 dollars): 1986: 111 1996: 116 2006: 109 2016: 80 (1) adjusted by BLS CPI Calculator