Apple is now worth $3 trillion — more than Walmart, Disney, Netflix, Nike, Exxon Mobil, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, AT&T, Goldman Sachs, Boeing, Ford and IBM combined.
When I joined IBM we were leader of the pack. Something definitely went wrong.
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IBM used to have its Research division investigating and developing technologies with a 10-20 years horizon. For the past 7 years we are increasingly essentially doing product development - advanced (calendar-wise) research at IBM is dead. Meanwhile, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and other companies are hiring our best, where they continue to develop the technologies to make future groundbreaking products. Unless IBM rebuilds and re-staffs its Research division and lets it incubate ideas not tied to immediate deployment, IBM will always be behind the competition. Personally, I am close to retirement, but it is tragic to witness the decay of IBM over the past 3 decades.
It is a bit ironic that Apple has, to a large degree, followed the old IBM model, just executed better. Apple designs the chips in its MacBooks, iPads, iPhones, and so forth. There is relatively little, for better or worse, that comes from outside. IBM has been steadily getting out of the business of hardware design, seeing that as a commodity business, reducing its investments. It sold (or more accurately, paid GlobalFoundries to take) its chip manufacturing FABs, right now those foundries are like printing money, GF has already made something like 300-400% ROI (and reneged on its commitments to provide chips to IBM). The hardware and firmware development efforts at Apple, AMD, Qualcomm, etc. are full of ex-IBM engineers, as are the executive ranks (Apple's Tim Cook spent 12 years in IBM's PC business). There is no substitute really for hiring good people, paying them enough to stay around, and encouraging them to innovate, and that is what Apple has been doing, a lot better than IBM. IBM needs to get back to basics, quite frankly.
Steve Jobs opinion of IBM in 1983:
https://designyoutrust.com/2015/11/photo-of-the-day-steve-jobs-giving-his-middle-finger-to-ibm-1983/
That's Tech envy. Like Freud meant when he said pe--s envy.
IBM is not Tech company, it's financial engineering company.
Lets hear it from horse's mouth, see what Jobs predicted
https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/heres-why-innovation-dies-at-big-tech-companies-according-to-steve-jobs/articleshow/45026943.cms
In the interview, Jobs discusses a range of topics, including how innovation can die out at large tech companies where marketing and sales are prioritized over disruptive innovation. Jobs used the example of Pepsi, which didn't often release new products except for different-sized bottles, so sales and marketing people would be the ones to get promoted and effectively run the company.
It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
The B2B model will never be a cash cow.
You can add Palmisano... he is the one who started the decline that started materializing after he left...
Ginny and Arvind happened.