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> IBM has not exactly had a stellar record at identifying the future. IBM invented/developed/introduced magnetic stripe cards, UPC Barcodes, the modern ATM, Ha
by helsinkiandrew 11mo ago
> IBM has not exactly had a stellar record at identifying the future.
IBM invented/developed/introduced magnetic stripe cards, UPC Barcodes, the modern ATM, Hard drives, floppies, DRAM, SQL, the 360 Family of Mainframes, the PC, Apollo guidance computers, Deep Blue. IBM created a far share of the future we're living in.
I'm no fan of much of what IBM is doing at the moment but it could be argued that its consultancy/service orientation gives it a good view of how business is and is planning to use AI.
- Aperocky 11mo agoThe other way to look at it is that the entire consulting industry is teetering on catastrophe. And IBM, being largely a consulting company now, is not being spared.
- carlmr 11mo agoThis is a separate argument though. A failing company may still be right in identifying other companies failure modes. You can be prescient about failure in one area and still fail yourself. There's no gotcha.
- marliechiller 11mo ago> A failing company may still be right in identifying other companies failure modes. Agreed if this is what they are doing, but what if theyre spewing claims to try and discredit an industry in order to quell their shareholder concerns?
- rbanffy 11mo agoThey are not the only ones looking at the money spent in AI datacentres and concluding most of the investment will not be recovered anytime soon. A lot of the silicon being deployed is great for training, but inefficient for inference and the training to inference ratio for usage shows a clear tendency to go the inference way. Furthermore, that silicon, with the workloads it runs, doesn’t last long and needs replacement. The first ones to go online might recover the investment, but the followers better have a plan to pivot to other uses.
- esseph 11mo agoIBM is not a failing company though, they are a Goliath in the Enterprise space.
- carlmr 11mo agoStill besides the point. The company failing or not is orthogonal to them being able to identify failure in others.
- bayindirh 11mo agoIBM was making "calculating cheese cutters" back in the day [0]. I'm sure they can pivot to something else if the need arises. [0]: https://imgur.com/a/ibm-cheese-cutter-Rjs2I https://imgur.com/a/ibm-cheese-cutter-Rjs2I
- kelnos 11mo agoIBM isn't failing, though. They're a profitable company with healthy margins, and enterprises continue to hire them for all sorts of things, in large numbers.
- Aperocky 11mo agoSo now it makes more sense why they think the AI spending will/need to fail. Because if it didn't, that's a direct replacement of them.
- jojobas 11mo agoAI replaces nothing. A consultant or developer is not replaced with AI, he becomes more powerful with AI. An IBM consultant with AI is still way ahead of Johnny Startup with AI.
- ahartmetz 11mo ago> The other way to look at it is that the entire consulting industry is teetering on catastrophe Oh? Where'd you get that information? If you mean because of AI, it doesn't seem to apply much to IBM. They are probably not great at what they do like most such companies, but they are respectable and can take the blame if something goes wrong. AI doesn't have these properties.
- leoc 11mo agoIf anything there’s likely plenty of work for body shops like IBM in reviewing and correcting AI-generated work product that has been thrown into production recently.
- iso1631 11mo agoThe whole point of a consultant is to let the execs blame someone else. Nobody got fired for buying something Gartner recommended, or for following EY's advice to lay off/hire I don't see AI taking that blame away.
- esseph 11mo agoThey own Red Hat Linux, Ansible, OpenShift, and Terraform. If you are doing anything in the Enterprise space, they probably have their claws in you be it on-prem or cloud. And their work on quantum... https://www.forbes.com/sites/baldwin/2025/11/25/inside-ibms-quest-to-win-the-quantum-computer-race/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/baldwin/2025/11/25/inside-ibms-... Not to mention they are still doing quite a bit of Mainframe...
- jrflowers 11mo ago> IBM invented/developed/introduced magnetic stripe cards, UPC Barcodes, the modern ATM, Hard drives, floppies, DRAM, SQL, the 360 Family of Mainframes, the PC, Apollo guidance computers, Deep Blue. IBM created a far share of the future we're living in. Well put. “IBM was wrong about computers being a big deal” is a bizarre take. It’s like saying that Colonel Sanders was wrong about chicken because he, uh… invented the pressure fryer.
- hinkley 11mo agoThey also either fairly accurately predicted the death of HDDs by selling off their research division before the market collapsed, or they caused the end of the HDD era by selling off their research division. They did a lot of research.
- ReptileMan 11mo agoThe hdd being dead will surely come as a surprise to the couple of 12TB rusties spinning joyously in my case right now.
- newsclues 11mo agoHDDs would be much more important today if flash storage didn’t exist.
- busssard 11mo agodid you know that SSD are not memory stable if they dont get electricity every now and again...
- jfindper 11mo agoOne family down the street from me still drives a Saturn! Yet no one is going to say "Saturn isn't dead!".
- ReptileMan 11mo ago
- meekaaku 11mo agoIBM is/was good at inventing a lot of tech. It may not be good at recognizing other good tech invented or paradigm changes by others
- IAmBroom 11mo agoNor is their CEO in any way unbiased.
- Glemkloksdjf 11mo agoFor the fact that they invented Deep Blue, they are really struggling with AI
- catwell 11mo agoTheir Granite family of models is actually pretty good! They just aren't working on the mainstream large LLMs that capture all the attention.
- rbanffy 11mo agoIBM is always very conscious of what their clients need (and the large consultancy business provides a very comprehensive view). It just turns out their clients don’t need IBM to invest in large frontier models.
- oedemis 11mo agoibm developed SSMs/mamba models and also releasing trainings datasets i think, also quantum computing is strategic option..
- Glemkloksdjf 11mo agoFor sure but do you see them at any relevant leader boards? Any news how good they are? I don't. I know their models, but not because i constantly read about it
- oedemis 11mo agohttps://huggingface.co/ibm https://huggingface.co/ibm here is very interesting research going https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite
- consp 11mo agoI've heard some second hand stories about IBM's way of using "AI" and it is pretty much business oriented and not much of the glamour and galore promises the other companies make (of course you still have shiny new things in business terms). It's actually good entertainment hearing all the internal struggles of business vs fancy during the holidays.
- lexszero_ 11mo agoNitpicking, IBM did non develop _the_ Apollo Guidance Computer (the one in the spacecraft with people), it was Raytheon. They did, however, developed the Launch Vehicle Digital Computer that controlled the Saturn rocket in Apollo missions. AGC had very innovative design, while LVDC was more conventional for that time.