IBM typically does things “first” (social media product efforts at IBM predated Facebook, for example), and IBM research has routinely produced innovations deca

IBM typically does things “first” (social media product efforts at IBM predated Facebook, for example), and IBM research has routinely produced innovations decades earlier than their adoption. WebSphere was a platform as a service in 2004. My personal opinion (having worked there 10 years with a lot of extremely talented people) is that the scale and types of customers IBM sells to distorts the engineering incentives. They don’t (because they can’t) build the simple MVP and iterate on it. Instead they have to bolt on “enterprise magic” like security integration, support for three different databases (db2, sqlserver, Oracle) from day one, and generally gold plate it. In addition deep pocket customers have massive pull and can distort product schedules because 90% of the revenue is concentrated in a few massive deals. That means “do what’s right for the user” becomes “id like this icon in cornflower Blue”. The price of massive success is perverse engineering incentives up and down the stack. It’s hard to appreciate from the outside, it’s just what end state enterprise story looks like when your deals are $20M and up.