Thread regarding IBM layoffs

There is a reason why its known as "Indian Bowel Movement"...

@2hdg+1tyrAur0

"The user community also deserves a lot of blame. IBM has coddled them for more than half a century by bending over backwards for compatibility..."

Let's be clear about what "the user community" is. The community consists of the largest and most entrenched corporations and governments in human society, not the least of which is IBM itself. You've touched on one of the central problems in this whole situation, which is stagnation. The System 360 platform (on which everything afterward is based) was marvelous in its time, and is still amazing in the present day for what it is, what it does and what it can do. However, improvements and changes will at best be incremental in nature, and not revolutionary.

There are no easy answers. The System 360 was a "bet the company" step in IBM's evolution, as was ISSC and the transition to services. IBM can go forward, but it will not grow without taking bigger steps. It's unclear at this point what those steps might be.

@1rqw+1tyrAur0 There is one other thing that Apple does that IBM does not. I would not say that Apple is alone; Microsoft does it and Google does it and... And that is telling customers that "we are changing a bunch of things and not all of your stuff will run as is going forward." They do this because not being chained to the past liberates them going forward. It has been noted here that IBM is a niche operation and that is true. It lives because of the mainframe. And that mainframe has so much crusty legacy s*it that they can now never get rid of. It's great being compatible with all this stuff from the 1960s and 70s and so on. But that comes at a cost. First, it's hard to innovate when you still have to support something like IMS (which was create to support NASA's Apollo program.) (I don't want to pick on IMS, but some of these other companies would have given it its last rites when DB2 was invented and moved their customers forward.) Second, organizations working on the platform still need system programming skills that they needed in the 1960s. And that, of course, means that the platform (key to IBM's survival) is not a popular place for younger people because those skills are mind numbing.

The user community also deserves a lot of blame. IBM has coddled them for more than half a century by bending over backwards for compatibility. And this community became addicted. IBM never forced them to modernize and many of them chose to stay in the dark ages because there was never the right time to move their enterprise forward.

Today, IBM benefits from the fact that, in the mainframe niche they live in, they hold the better cards: many of their customers are stuck paying extortionate rents. But at some point that has to end and this platform has so much rot and decay that there will never be any new customers. Perhaps if IBM had forced customers to get slightly out of their comfort zone and modernize in a symbiotic way, the platform would have a brighter future.

IBM is not a commodity vendor...end of story. They will never compete with the Intels of the world, nor will they really compete with the Linux and open-source evangelists. However, if you're an enterprise that's looking for rock-solid platforms that have to be operational 24x7x365, then IBM can help you...for a price. IBM is a niche player, and to be blunt I think most IBM executives are OK with that.

Everyone else, however, will need to reset their expectations if they haven't already done so...

In looking at HW (Power, Sun, DEC, HP, etc etc) it always boils down to ISV adoption/support, and HW and SW costs including maintenance. In looking at head to head comparisons of any of the players named above, generic Intel has always prevailed no matter how you did the math 1 year, 3 year, or 5 year, and thus always won. Customers rarely factor in reliability, performance, or ongoing support costs into their decision making check mark sheets. It all boils down to pricing and maintenance costs. Intel figured that out early and priced accordingly. If you compare the only remaining player (Power) vs Intel solution even today, you will find a 2-3X difference over time and thus “Intel is good enough to win”. Ever wonder why Power went from an 8 billion dollar book of business per year to less than 2 billion. See above for the answer. Power has been delegated to the performance aside, and IBM has accepted that and priced accordingly. Power is a great product, but it’s not priced to win when you are competing in a commodity marketplace. That’s something IBM exec managers never understood or accepted

I meant nail in the coffin for DEC and not IBM. But my concern remains the same. CEOs often let their own personal bias cloud decision making.

I went thru some of the experiences when I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation, I was very proud to be a DECie and I was surrounded by some incredibly intelligent and talented people. The founder Ken Olson resigned and he did not believe layoffs were the answer to declining business. Ken was an engineer at heart and the kind of CEO who would roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty engineering the technology. Not a Steve Jobs but more like Wozniak. So the board replaced him with Bob Palmer who slashed and practically burned the company down to the ground until he let DEC get sold off to Compaq who later who got acquired by HP. Ken made some mistakes along the way by not embracing the personal computer market or UNIX market soon enough. Bob Palmer pretty much put all the DEC eggs in one basket by going all in on the Alpha chip technology. The trouble was they could not find many partners or OEMs to commit to developing software to run on Alpha. Palmer had a background in semi-conductor technology so his own biased decision making put the final nails in the coffin for IBM. I pray that Arvind and the leadership team at IBM do not let their own personal biases cloud their vision and strategy on where to take the company.

Smartest thing steve Jobs did was to cancel the dividend when the company needed cash to reinvest in its future. IBM investors wont approve that. It takes a really strong CEO vision. If IBM cancelled the dividend, theyd just carve it up as exec payouts and buy more companies to pilage.

If you take the long view, sure, everything comes to an end, especially tech. Even Earth has an expiration date. Some companies die off due to natural obsolescence — coal mines, for example — but most do so because of poor leadership, complacency, corruption, inability to pivot, diversify, etc.

Does IBM have a coherent strategy right now? Slash and burn. Make up arbitrary, constantly-changing rules for RTO and PIPs to get rid of people regardless of the value of their contribution or institutional memory, and offshore everything to subpar, low-paid, resources in the CEO’s country of choice. WatsonX is a Hail Mary pass. But anyone who has interacted with it knows it can’t compete because it’s absolute garbage, and irretrievably so given the trajectory of the company.

As far as I can tell, the Mustache is a man without a vision, or a backup plan, other than driving up the stock price by moving numbers around on a spreadsheet quarter-to-quarter, surrounded by yes-men, and despised by a good chunk of the workforce.

He knows he’s an unloved, placeholder CEO and doesn’t care. He’s going to use the company as a short-term cash grab for himself and his cronies while he can. IBM may have been in decline before him, but he’s an accelerant. Will the board let him burn the company to the ground before a better leader can come in and try to save it, is anyone’s guess.

I'm probably the only one on here that has used a RCA Spectra 70, which was basically an IBM 360 clone.

Here is a dramatic retelling of one of its uses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgsfXnTWXeI

I used it to do some work for RCA for the Trident submarine in the remains of the factory that RCA used for making Elvis records (RCA Camden label).

Lou Gerstner did something similar at IBM - laid off 100,000 and effectively destroyed the old IBM culture. It survived, and rebounded, but the glory days were gone and any 'respect for the individual' was gone.

To be honest, if you really want to look up the greatest company destroyer to ever exist in the USA, look no further than Milton Friedman and Wall Street.

GE in particular was destroyed by the actions of 2 of its CEOs, Neutron Jack Welch and
Jeff Immelt.

Neutron Jack in particular showed many other CEOs how to destroy a company (in rich people's parlance, 'how to extract wealth').

Why is Jack Welch called Neutron Jack?

After Welch laid off more than 100,000 people in his first years as CEO, he earned the nickname he hated but could never shake: "Neutron Jack," a reference to the neutron bo-b, which purportedly ki-ls people while leaving buildings standing.

Whilst IBM may be the last of the companies standing from a historical perspective, I don't believe how it's currently run constitutes a short-term plan or a long term plan for growth or even stability.

We're not asking the company to overtake Google and Nvidia. Just to have a plan that's believable and plays to our strengths.

General Electric (GE) makes an interesting case study. The consumer businesses (GE Lighting and GE Appliances) are now controlled by separate companies (Savant and Haier). GE Capital was split between several different companies. The remains of GE were split and renamed into three spinoff companies (GE Aerospace, GE Vernova (formerly GE Power), and GE Healthcare).

IBM has been proceeding along a similar path for some time.

I think another reason for failure is the move away from consumerism, all the big players have either some or a lot of commercial offerings (apple is really just that), but AWS and Micro excel in this area. it makes them a well known brand also outside of just a business vendor.

And NCR broke up into 2 publicly traded companies in October 2023:

• NCR Voyix, focused on digital commerce

• NCR Atleos, focused on ATMs

https://www.ncr.com/

This is just one person's opinion. I think that, in terms of relevance to computing in general, IBM peaked in the 1990s with the Power processor and its various follow-ons. That architecture really was (and is) very good: it's clean; it's uncluttered; it delivered high performance computing; it was somewhat daring in its SMP memory system (again, enabling high performance but requiring thoughtful system programming.)

It was intriguing enough to get Apple to make it their Mac processor for a while. One variant, CELL, was used by SONY in some generations of Play Station. There are also specialized embedded versions. Even now, if you go to top500.org, this architecture is in the 9th most powerful supercomputer as of June 2024. "Back in the day," let's say 2006, this architecture was used in the first, second and third most powerful supercomputer.

Also, IBM recognized that the only operating system that mattered in this space was Unix and they bought and maintained a standard Unix system and when Linux came along, they were happy to adopt that too. (They also have a Linux on Z that no one uses.) In the original architecture, "big-endian" was slightly more preferable but, over time, the processor became completely agnostic.

I think that those were the best days for IBM. So what happened? Let's start with the cell processor. That was an amazing machine and very difficult to program. In a very real way, it foreshadowed the world we live in today with a CPU and a GPU mining bitcoins and building an LLM AI monster. But it was not easy to program. Next, let's look at what Intel and later ARM did. They attacked in a couple of directions. First, the price to performance ratio was always IBM's Achilles heel. When you have superior performance, you can ignore this problem. But somewhere between the 386 and today, the performance of these other parts became more than close enough. (I'll also mention that, as a computing device, Z cannot hold a candle to any of these. It has its strengths but raw computing power is not one.) A second major problem is the amount of (electric) power the Power family consumes. Power consumption (and the heat generated from that consumption) mean that you cannot have a battery operated version. (Which is probably why Apple moved on.)

IBM does have other, more current contributions to computer science. They claim to be both AI and quantum computing leaders. But, for my money, the best thing the ever really did (in terms of computing) was the Power family.

You know that IBM focused on services and retained the mainframe biz bc it fit the new direction of the company. IBM worked to shed its hardware assets imagine is mass. Its was nothing like it was as a part of the "BUNCH. I know, I was there those years.