It's apprehensive that a company once on the cutting edge of technology and so wired into the socioeconomic systems of the world now only pioneers in new ways to sc--w over their employees. The Executive suite is unconscionable and void of any soul. The BoD should be ashamed of themselves and be forced to resign.
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Milton Friedman was right.
Companies are not political parties.
If you want to fix society, maybe don’t vote for the extreme left or extreme right. Don’t look to IBM or any other company for how to run a society.
Let companies get on with the work of making money, ya know, so people can buy a house vs. paint their skin in their political parties colors.
You just have to accept this is the way things are. But(secks) if you don't like it, you can always depart.
Don’t be surprised if IBM and Amazon don’t announce an even more “all in” collaboration. IBM does not do cloud well, and Amazon does not do enterprise consulting well
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-collaborates-aws-launch-cloud-203700895.html
Correction. Apttio might have brought in a couple of hundred million in annual revenues prior to the acquisition. Still IBM overpaid by a lot and an all cash acquisition
And how did IBM find itself in a less than desirable cash situation. Wells let’s see. Revenue growth is not so great. They overpaid for the acquisition of Apttio by billions for a company that only brought in a couple of million in revenue. They drastically overpaid and over leveraged themselves for the acquisition of RedHat. Servicing the debt has probably been costlier. And the finance people at IBM are geniuses. Not!
Well said and spot-on.
The shareholders-first mindset is responsible for the rot in American business (for example, see the Netflix documentary on Boeing), the financiaization of everything, the decimation of the middle class, the incredible concentration of wealth in so few people, the greed of business executives (the principal-agent problem writ large), the destruction of the environment and the political cancer in American politics.
A late boomer myself and former IBM employee, I look forward to the passing of the boomer generation. I’m afraid that the point of no return for the next generation may have already been reached, however.
You can bet there are no "low skilled" resources in Legal
HR Legal is probably the best and safest area in IBM
It’s just the bean counters trying to make the numbers work. Take consulting division 19 billion in revenue divided over 160k worth of employees. That’s approx 120k per employee. 120k in the 3rd world is incredibly profitable, but 120k in the USA or Western Europe is barely making the burden rate. So what’s a bean counter to do Offshoring jumps to mind as consultants only have 2000 hours per year to bill against and maximizing profit is what they are tasked to do. Like it or not, it’s all about efficiency and IBM’s on shore costs are too high vs off shore
If you are looking for someone to blame, you can blame the legions of economists, politicians and businesspeople since Milton Friedman who promoted "Shareholder Primacy". Shareholder Primacy is an economic theory that states that "corporations have no higher purpose than maximizing profits for their shareholders".
Friedman also said that "if corporations were to accept anything but making money for their stockholders as their primary purpose, it would thoroughly undermine the very foundation of our free society". (New York Times, September 13, 1970)
IBM is the perfect example of that theory taken to its logical end...a company that has sold itself off for cash...its people, its technology, its resources, its creativity. Why did it do this? The Board of Directors of the IBM Corporation went to cash over the decades to preserve shareholder value.
And you know what? This is NO different than any other company in our society, including (in the US) the US Government, and for that matter other entities around the world. When making money is your highest objective, then all other interests take a back seat.
"The love of money is the root of all evil."
Exponential decay at its best
Continuation of a slowly dying company ,by any measurement.