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It’s natural for large tech companies to enter the harvesting business when they can’t innovate anymore. Look at IBM. They just can’t innovate, so they do all
by mathattack 6y ago
It’s natural for large tech companies to enter the harvesting business when they can’t innovate anymore. Look at IBM. They just can’t innovate, so they do all kinds of financial engineering on the back of a robust customer audit program.
Eventually that money gets recycled into funding earlier stage companies. (If a company buys back stock, the old investors have to put the money somewhere)
- dragontamer 6y agoIBM's chips seem pretty innovative to me. A large amount of IBM's software is stagnant though. OpenCAPI, SMT4... and POWER10 has those GDDR modules coming for ~1000GBps memory bandwidths.
- sitkack 6y agoIBM has a full hardware/software stack, cloud computing and consulting services. What is your basis the claim?
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoHave you seen their customers vs their competitors’ customers? And Watson is a joke.
- mathattack 6y agoToo much time working with them as a partner and vendor.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago> Look at IBM. They just can’t innovate Indeed. But they shot themselves in the foot when they replaced their experienced, expensive staff with low-wage Indian workers (not to pick specifically on Indians... there are certainly Pakistanis and other Asian cultures represented in that cohort).
- moneywoes 6y agoWas it their development team?
- mathattack 6y agoThat’s consistent with giving up on innovation. And the age discrimination fight they’ve had.
- StillBored 6y agoIts not that large companies can't innovate (re: IBM) its that they can't cannibalize their high margin businesses on risky strategies until its too late. This happens over and over, intel wasn't willing to bet on low margin phone SoC's at the expensive of their laptop/server business. Now those low margin SoC providers are selling a billion chips a quarter and financing a manufacturing behemoth that intel can't keep up with. Same thing with IBM, porting zos/ztpf/aix/i5/etc to x86 and making servers wasn't something they could justify, so they spun the business off to lenovo which grew it 5x, and now IBM is stuck with hardware they can't get enough volume on in a shrinking (but high margin!) business. If they were selling POWER10 blue pi's for $50 they might have a chance in the edge space or IoT, but that might cannibalize the business elsewhere.
- qznc 6y agoSimon Wardley describes it very well as "past success breeds inertia": https://medium.com/wardleymaps/exploring-the-map-ad0266fad59b https://medium.com/wardleymaps/exploring-the-map-ad0266fad59...
- ksec 6y ago> Look at IBM. They just can’t innovate They are still so far ahead in Hardware I dont see how they are not innovating. Software, Marketing, Sales, Operation, Management ..... well pretty much everything apart from CPU / Big Iron related really.
- PeCaN 6y agoIronically enough I feel like IBM is actually an example of a giant company that, against all odds, is somehow still innovating, at least with its POWER CPUs. They're doing really interesting and open-ended things like CAPI and the upcoming Open Memory Interface.