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You have no idea what you are talking about. IBM does more cutting edge research than the entire HN bubble combined. Hard research like materials science and se
by manicennui 3y ago
You have no idea what you are talking about. IBM does more cutting edge research than the entire HN bubble combined. Hard research like materials science and semiconductors.
Consulting is less than a third of their revenue and regardless of how you feel about consulting, it seems kind of idiotic to claim that this "barely makes sense at all at this point". Are the only companies that make sense the ones that work on fad bullshit that makes the front page of HN?
- Upvoter33 3y agoI think the true thing is that IBM has ceased to be a leader in Computer Science. They used to be! But they gave that up long ago, and have resorted to various publicity stunts (e.g., remember Jeopardy?). But sure, they may be a leader in materials and semiconductors (though honestly I have no idea, that's not my space).
- sgt101 3y ago[flagged]
- dlevine 3y ago[flagged]
- _ea1k 3y agoPeople mock them for that Jeopardy thing, but that would have been the perfect first move to offering something like Watson as a service. They could have built it over time to offer real assistance to knowledge workers with a real revenue stream. But that would have required vision and foresight.
- local_crmdgeon 3y agoThat's exactly what it was for, but it was basically a fraud: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/technology/what-happened-ibm-watson.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/technology/what-happened-...
- SoftTalker 3y agoThe problem is that "Watson" wasn't a real thing, it was just a name they gave to any solution they were trying to sell.
- juve1996 3y agoThey did and it failed miserably.
- piyh 3y agoThey're cutting edge on quantum computing, can't think of anything more computer science than that.
- gitfan86 3y agoSo they say. Remember Watson? Whatever came of that? IBM is PR and overpriced IT outsourcing.
- elorant 3y agoAnd what are the real life applications of quantum computing?
- bawolff 3y agoThere are quite significant applications related to simulating certain quantum processes. However everyone is still pretty far off from that.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rybosworld 3y agoThey have seemingly 1000 products so it's definitely not fair to apply experiences with one of those, to all of the others. That said, I've hated the handful of IBM software products I've needed to use. Another anecdote: I've never met a fellow developer that spoke highly of IBM. That includes the folks who used to work there. I think it's remarkable how rare it is to meet someone that speaks highly of the company. Companies don't usually achieve such reputation without reason.
- gjadi 3y ago"There are two types of companies: the ones people complain about, and the ones nobody has heard of."
- makeitdouble 3y agoIn which camp do you put TSMC ?
- fallingknife 3y agoNobody has heard of. Ask people outside of tech and I bet <10% have heard of this company.
- asdfman123 3y agoLots of people have heard of them, but most of the people who have actually worked there speak Chinese.
- skeeter2020 3y agoFor a company that's done so much tech, and had such a huge impact on the computer industry, there are very few "true blue" IBMers who you can hold up as engineering pioneers. Tehy've always been bog-standard salesmen.
- dc-programmer 3y ago
- tootie 3y agoIBM also bet the farm on AI about 10 years ago and belly-flopped. Their Watson AI suite was pretty advanced and they famously beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy, but they didn't get vary far making their tools practical or profitable. And now they've just been crushed by OpenAI. I wonder if the subtext to their announcement is that they're ditching their entire AI department and buying services from OpenAI instead.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoThis is without even getting into projects under NDA.
- sidewndr46 3y agoSure, those 24 consecutive quarters of revenue decline under Rometty is an obvious indication of cutting edge. Cutting edge research on how to turn investors money into into option traders profits.
- abakker 3y agoI'd point out at that Ginni Rometty was a bad CEO, but that doesn't mean that people there didn't do good research. Like, they're pretty unrelated. Research and Development is notoriously hard to commercialize. Over here in HN land, we just say that product market fit is poor or that products didn't get traction, but those are just as akin to R&D as anything. A better model was that Rometty was not good at choosing what to fund and which bets to make. kinda a failed VC fund.
- sidewndr46 3y agoWhat good is a R&D performed that can't be commercialized? To me, that is just good research followed by bad development. No one investing in IBM is expecting it to be a public works project. Lookup the saga of HP's memristor followed by "The Machine" for a similar story.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y ago> What good is a R&D performed that can't be commercialized? Then I guess we can throw out Xerox Parc's NLS because they never commercialized "windows, hypertext, graphics, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor." They were commercialized by others later on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos We can also throw out most psych, social science, archeology, and history R&D, too.
- willcipriano 3y ago> We can also throw out most psych, social science Yes.
- LawTalkingGuy 3y agoYou can't hire their research arm. > regardless of how you feel about consulting It's a matter of how well they do it. They're not known for creating customer value. > Are the only companies that make sense the ones ... who don't lay off entire arenas full of people and discuss stupid platitudes like replacing them with AI. Pretty much. Management's messaging around this was so delusional - "replace with AI" - that it's obviously a stock play from a company desperate to cut losses, not a positive statement from a going concern.
- propogandist 3y agoit is possible to hire the research division, you just have to be a multi-billion dollar enterprise. They do joint research partnerships and outsourcing for large organizations to build out new technology. IBM is not very good at commercializing IP, so the partner takes on that responsibility.
- agumonkey 3y agoThis is the strange side of IBM. Very muddy and mild "normal" software engineering, and all of a sudden, top 3 (maybe top 1) Quantum Computing research.
- acomjean 3y agoFormer IBM Research employee here (At the turn of the last century, and I did database stuff for them, not research). They spent 6 billion dollars a year on research. They had a chip fab in my building (Yorktown NY) had chemists, physicist, mathematicians... The really seemed to be struggling to try and turn that R&D into profits though. The hot new thing at IBM was "global services" consulting. Since I left they've sold their chip business, laptop business and really doubled down on consulting..
- technology23 3y agoacomjean how long did you work on databases at IBM? Did you get to work with Edgar Codd or do you know someone who might know someone who worked with him?
- garbagecoder 3y agobro, I'm not holding my breath for the next Benoit Mandelbrot to come out of today's IBM. The comment above might have been hyperbolic, sure, but IBM isn't the omnipresent Goliath it once was. Maybe it's for us older folks that the comparison rings more true.