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I do not understand how IBM stays in business. As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique me

• bastardoperator 5y ago
  Easy. Governments, emerging countries, and heavy handed consulting. Once you're on their garbage it becomes near impossible to leave it.
• 300bps 5y ago
  They’re a public company. Here’s how they make money: https://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM-2Q-Earnings-Press-Release.pdf https://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM-2Q-Earnings-Press-R...
  • stefan_ 5y ago
    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.
    • rbanffy 5y ago
      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.
• streetcat1 5y ago
  You should read more about the history of IBM. IBM is a sale driven organization. I.e. sale first - tech after. so it cannot be judged as an high tech company, I.e. on the tech. A point of reference is SUN - which was tech first - sale after. Another point of reference is HP. HP was tech first, but turned into sales first.
• amelius 5y ago
  How does any IT person stay in business if they do not create cool stuff? There's your answer.
• Sharlin 5y ago
  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.
• thallium205 5y ago
  Although small in comparison, they also bought weather underground for a cool billion or so and completely ran it into the ground.
  • duck_bacon 5y ago
    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.
    • sandworm101 5y ago
      >> 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.
      • raincom 5y ago
        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.
        • lotsofpulp 5y ago
          Not for IBM. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/market-cap https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/market-cap 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.
• vishnugupta 5y ago
  Last I heard they were dabbling in Blockchain. Atleast they were publicly making noise about it.
  • ta988 5y ago
    Oh my, I saw a presentation of that. Dabbling is not even the word.
  • jiscariot 5y ago
    Marketed as Blockchain with Watson(TM) most likely.
    • ta988 5y ago
      Same salesman, same lobbying, same results.
  • reidjs 5y ago
    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.
  • absoluteharam 5y ago
    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 https://petri.com/blockchain-bust-microsoft-joins-ibm-with-blockchain-shutdown https://petri.com/blockchain-bust-microsoft-joins-ibm-with-b...
    • Jansen312 5y ago
      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.
      • 5y ago
• ferdowsi 5y ago
  They coast on enterprise lock-in while pretending they are innovative by shoveling money into non-useful blockchain projects.
  • bobbob1921 5y ago
    And MARKETING, ofcourse.
  • spookthesunset 5y ago
    Remember when they were all in on Second Life? They had some virtual town hall or something and there were flying penises everywhere? Those were the days…
• jeremyjh 5y ago
  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).
  • lokar 5y ago
    They also run th backed for major airline booking systems, and charge outrageous amounts.
    • sofixa 5y ago
      The biggest airline booking system, Amadeus, can actually run on Kubernetes and some airlines are migrating to it. Fun fact: a few years back Amadeus employees were in the top 15 of k8s contributors by company.
      • rbanffy 5y ago
        I’d love to see their architecture. Do they publish much?
      • ed25519FUUU 5y ago
        Is airline booking software very complex? I don’t see why that software would necessitate the updating of k8s.
        • relaxing 5y ago
          Yes, it is. Read up on the history of SABRE and you’ll get pretty much the entire history of digital computing, post-UNIVAC, in the process.
        • raverbashing 5y ago
          > Is airline booking software very complex? If this is surprising to you, you have no idea. It's a 24/7 business as a start. Multiple flights, multiple fares, multiple ways of booking a flight, airline agreements, etc
• tormeh 5y ago
  Afaik they're a consultancy now. That means all their other activities are more or less just lead generation
  • gitfan86 5y ago
    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
• colonwqbang 5y ago
  Do you have a link to the commercial?
  • nickysielicki 5y ago
    Yikes, I misremembered, it’s a Hewlett-Packard commercial. https://youtu.be/0EL3ZkcMNS4 https://youtu.be/0EL3ZkcMNS4 This commercial still makes me laugh. The way she finishes his sentence with “our digital transformation” is the kicker.
    • pfraze 5y ago
      That line really is the kicker. I compulsively muttered “god damnit” when I heard it.
    • jjnoakes 5y ago
      It'd be nice if you edited your post with the correction.
      • asveikau 5y ago
        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.
        • axiosgunnar 5y ago
          Or when Microsoft spent millions on giving NFL reporters tablets while in air, only for the reporters to refer to the tablets as „iPads“? :D
    • rbanffy 5y ago
      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.
• gigatexal 5y ago
  Yeah … My thoughts exactly.
• jiscariot 5y ago
  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.
  • robk 5y ago
    That seems negligent enough for your company to sue them
    • Bombthecat 5y ago
      Good luck suing ibm..
      • Aeolun 5y ago
        It may take a while, but you’ll win.
        • wussboy 5y ago
          At what cost?
          • jcranmer 5y ago
            My guesstimate of the legal fees to try the case would be in the region of $100k.
          • axiosgunnar 5y ago
            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.
• themanmaran 5y ago
  > Watson on Jeopardy Marketing aside. Lets not forget how cool that was. It was a great public demonstation that AI / ML is possible now.
  • five82 5y ago
    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.
• blip54321 5y ago
  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.
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    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.
    • treis 5y ago
      IBM is basically an Indian firm these days
      • scrubs 5y ago
        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.
• rwbaskette 5y ago
  I don't suppose you remember the "IBM OS/2 Fiesta Bowl"?
• riddleronroof 5y ago
  Because people who make that fatal decision read Gartner magic quadrants.
  • rbobby 5y ago
    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. /lol
    • beckingz 5y ago
      They just work if you dont' care about money.
  • wussboy 5y ago
    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."
  • bredren 5y ago
    Magic quadrants are not kidding around. 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.
  • 5y ago
• bproven 5y ago
  you just need to think of IBM as a service and consultancy company - because that is what they are (and have been for quite a while).
• keewee7 5y ago
  They do "boring" IT like making ticketing systems for the railways and metros.
• acomjean 5y ago
  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.
  • Spooky23 5y ago
    They have since pivoted again. IGS was just spun out into a new company whose name is gibberish. Lol.
• mathattack 5y ago
  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.
• csallen 5y ago
  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.
  • wussboy 5y ago
    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.
    • kitd 5y ago
      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. Let the big fish swim together.
      • sangnoir 5y ago
        Add counterparty risk to that too: if things go south and Big Corp decides to sue, small corp may go bankrupt in the process.
    • rdtwo 5y ago
      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
• agumonkey 5y ago
  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.
  • davidgerard 5y ago
    > Quantum Computing which may take over the world, but is presently at the stage "call me when it can reliably factor 35"
• Tade0 5y ago
  > I do not understand how IBM stays in business. 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.
  • twistedpair 5y ago
    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.
• tinyhouse 5y ago
  > I do not understand how IBM stays in business. 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.
• ThinkBeat 5y ago
  They make awesome mainframes. 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.
  • Karunamon 5y ago
    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.
    • relaxing 5y ago
      Hiding that knowledge behind expensive certifications is part of the business proposition.
• zitsarethecure 5y ago
  > They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, I know they bought Red Hat but I didn't hear that they gutted it. Can you expand on that?
  • louniks 5y ago
    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.
  • dralley 5y ago
    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]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30047062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30047062
  • hackerbrother 5y ago
    Was going to say, Red Hat seems to be doing fine/great. Very innovative Linux company.
  • frost_knight 5y ago
    Traveling consultant-architect for Red Hat here. 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.
  • throwaway-octet 5y ago
• MattGaiser 5y ago
  They will deal with all the crappy and lazy and incompetent clients. They bid on all the government work, the bank work, the insurance work, etc. The kinds of places where HN devs would say your career goes to die, along with your soul. They will do the stuff the internal teams at those companies pass on.
  • newaccount2021 5y ago
• cycomanic 5y ago
  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.
• chefandy 5y ago
  > I do not understand how IBM stays in business. 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.
• permalac 5y ago
  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.
• hintymad 5y ago
  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.
• tmccrary55 5y ago
  Living off those mainframe MIPS bucks...
• tsywke44 5y ago
  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.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• seanp2k2 5y ago
  I’m guessing that governments are keeping them afloat, especially on long-term contracts and with bespoke projects.
• dvh 5y ago
  IBM is current record holder for largest number factored of quantum computer using Shor's algorithm: 21. And in 2019 they almost succeeded for 35.
• jessriedel 5y ago
  The number 2 experimental quantum computing group in the world is at IBM Research.
• throwaway4good 5y ago
  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.
• ibmfud 5y ago
  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.