Has anyone ever had great things to say about IBM? I did my 7 years there, FWIW... It's not a geek friendly company, I think it just happens to be that simple.

Has anyone ever had great things to say about IBM? I did my 7 years there, FWIW... It's not a geek friendly company, I think it just happens to be that simple. They do some great technology, they've invented a ton of great stuff but where geeks embrace the technology for the technology and dream, IBM does technology because they can sell it and, again, it's just that simple. Whereas Microsoft and a lot of the SV companies are based on the idea that a great tech company needs to be run by a great engineer/nerd. IBM is firmly rooted in the camp that great companies are run by great sales folks and they've had an incredible run. That's why hackers so consistently hate them. Hackers and geeks just see the technology differently. I really don't know what their future holds, their downfall has been predicted for decades. Getting out of PCs made a lot of sense to me, I still think HP and Dell are potentially in heaps of trouble as soon as some Russian, Indian or Chinese company decides to really go after them and starts to figure things out, they're just putting commodity parts together at the end of the day anyways. Getting out of semiconductor manufacturing doesn't seem like a bad idea either, there are some very very good fab shops out there and they're only going to get better and the margins on fab-for-hire will drop so you have to corner the volume. I definitely can say I'd love to just screw around with a Watson, maybe even have a Watson app on my iPhone and just ask it stuff throughout the day, I'd pay some subscription for it (maybe like $20-30 a month if it's as good as it looked) but I bet what I'd pay is a drop in the bucket compared to what law firms, certain doctors or various financial executives would pay for one and so long as there is that market, I'd assume IBM will go after that and not the solo geek that just wants to have a really fancy google and wikipedia search. I'm not sure what they're going to build in the future, but I'm pretty confident they'll make piles of money and be disdained and have their demise predicted by geeks though.