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IBM has not been a “company” in decades. It is a financial engineering project. When you see it through that lens all of this makes much more sense.
by momokoko 6y ago
IBM has not been a “company” in decades.
It is a financial engineering project. When you see it through that lens all of this makes much more sense.
- boris 6y agoExactly, IBM is a company run by finance, not technical people. They survive despite, not because of what they do.
- Sylamore 6y agocan confirm, IBM (GTS at least) has more people dedicated to ensuring you project your future billable hours and will directly reduce your performance rating for not providing the projections every 2 weeks than if you miss client deliverables consistently.
- sushshshsh 6y agogood thing its much easier to project future billable hours compared to actually delivering value quickly in 2020 ^.^
- 1MachineElf 6y agoYou're absolutley right about GTS, but it's clear that the services offerings from IBM aren't what top level commenter here is praising.
- cmsj 6y agoNot to nitpick, but the current CEO has a PhD in Electrical Engineering and started working at IBM Research in 1990.
- Supermancho 6y agoI'm sure lots of people at IBM have EE degrees throughout it's existence. That hasn't caused the company to behave any differently. When approached by IBM to help my company build out our cloud infrastructure, we had salient measured targets and the reps (and subsequent "technical people to answer our questions") who presented were woefully inept. I was the Director of Engineering, what did they think they were doing pitching me butterflies and rainbows? What IBM has done for decades, like all the other parasitic remnants of industry (Oracle, Yahoo, arguably Apple, etc), and no CEO is changing that culture.
- pishpash 6y agoThey are indeed incompetent, since a large chunk of competent people won't go there any more. But what kind of financial voodoo is keeping them afloat? Is it another Sears in waiting?
- Aperocky 6y agoAn enron Enron goes down in 10 or so years, an not so enron Enron might last a good 20 or 30 years.
- coliveira 6y agoPresent day IBM is not very different from GE. It is a financial company trying to survive from profits in areas it monopolizes. Without anything else to do, GE is going down hard and now is being investigated by the SEC for "accounting practices", i.e., financial manipulation to keep the company alive.
- lmm 6y agoThey're effective as an Oracle-like consulting company that buys third-party products, integrates them into their platform, and then cross-sells them hard.
- rusticpenn 6y agoThey seem to have a good research division. I learnt a lot form their research on neural hardware during my PhD
- ezequiel-garzon 6y agolike all the other parasitic remnants of industry (Oracle, Yahoo, arguably Apple, etc) Would you mind sketching the case for Apple as an example?
- lkrubner 6y agoI don't know what they meant, but I think the case is reasonably easy, if the accusation is "financial engineering." Apple's overall range of products have shrunk over the years. I'm old enough to remember when they had 20 different kinds of desktop computers, updated every year. They now have 1 desktop, updated every few years, one laptop, updated every few years. There is a sense they've given up on everything but the iPhone. Arguably, Apple keeps producing Mac computers only because iPhone devs need to run XCode somewhere. The iPhone was introduced in 2007. It was very innovative at the time, though now it has dozens of Android clones. Total sales of iPhones seems to have peaked -- increases in Apple's profits have come from raising prices and managing margins. This last bit would be the heart of the case that Apple is now increasingly financial in nature and therefore parasitic. They don't seem to be rolling out much in the way of new products, and certainly nothing as "change the world" as the iPhone was in 2007. I think it is well known that Apple does not have the "division per product group" structure that almost all other large companies have. But Apple has an unusually narrow range of products for such a large company. Even projects that Apple seemed excited about 6 or 7 years ago, such as home entertainment, no longer seems to be priority for them. I can tell you from personal experience, their Apple TV has been absolutely stagnant for years, and many of the problems, which I assumed they would eventually fix, have not been fixed.
- whymauri 6y agoThe CEO is one piece of the administrative puzzle for a company that large (>100k employees).
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- dade_ 6y agoIBM business units are black (Profitable or losing a small amount of money but missing targets), green (exceeding targets), or red (rapidly dropping revenue and losing money) blocks. They buy a business, it's black. They don't understand how the block works, but they need to to be more profitable, so they paint the IBM logo on everything, cut costs and headcount until it is green for a short while. Then it turns black, they rinse and repeat. They make it green a few more times and then finally instead of green, it turns red! Then they combine some red blocks, bundle them together, make it look black or green and sell them off. This looks like the biggest bundle jettison ever, but after acquiring Red Hat, that makes sense.
- edem 6y agoCan you elaborate on that? I worked for IBM for a little more than a year and it was deeply disturbing, but I don't really understand what's happening under the hood.
- Minor49er 6y agoCan you elaborate on what was deeply disturbing about your experience? Your comment has me curious.
- edem 6y agoThey bought the company I was working for. They turned everything upside down. Tried to force us to sign contrats that would make them the owner of our public contributions which lead to an outrage so they backed down. Later they did "patent minig" sessions where they tried to extract good ideas from people for free. They also shut down all projects and pushed their Watson shit on us. They didn't give a shit about company culture, and people in general so 90% of the employees who had even a tiny bit of ambition left for a startup that was created by people who left IBM after the acquisition.
- bitsnbytes 6y agoThat pretty much sums up my experience with IBM when they bought our company as well. I had a colleague who quit immediately finding out they bought us out because he had worked for them before. I gave them the benefit of the doubt but he was right and I left once they started to integrate us into the borg. Just about everyone ended up leaving not to long after either.
- setpatchaddress 6y agoThat's a real shame. Most large, old American companies have fallen into that trap. Notably RCA (gone) and GE (going). I hope Apple doesn't eventually succumb. Tim Cook's successor matters.
- mulmen 6y agoApparently GE sold off trains which seems like a pretty good business to own?
- jonas21 6y agoOut of all the business lines GE has sold off over the years (computers, appliances, financial services, lighthing, television, etc.), why trains?
- senko 6y agoGE was a slow-mo train wreck for years (pun intended). Recently read "Lights out", about their problems in the last ~20 years, fascinating read, heartily recommended.
- cultus 6y agoAnd yet Jack Welch somehow came to be looked upon as a management guru instead of someone who gutted the long-term viability of GE in favor of financialization.
- loganfrederick 6y agoLuckily I think history is doing its job in changing how Jack Welch's legacy will be remembered. I don't think students or upcoming businesspeople are really learning Welch's approach anymore.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoJack Welch has definitely fallen out of favor considering the results obviously illustrate his failures.
- mathattack 6y agoYes. They aren’t in the innovation business. They are in the Marketing (Watson), audit and share buyback business.