Word of advice to all the Digital people that are new to GE.
Your working on a management's wet dream.
Jeff's dream of distracting wall street to sell GE as a digital company and hoping to cash in on tech valuation levels like Google and Apple.
Sorry but there will be very little possibility to monetized all this fancy new software.
Hint ... look at the potential customers and ask yourself if they have the money to pay for all those expensive reoccurring licensing fees
And GE wants to throw away $34b on merging with baker Hughes? Why would you want to do that? Crazy, drilling for oil is a dying industry.
I just left for much better oppty. after being with GE Power Services (at a Digital Hub) for a year as our group was preparing to transition to Digital at any moment. Worked on PREDIX the whole time and can backup what you guys are saying. The many millions of savings and revenue that Digital was committed to wasn't even remotely feasible. Our product (FieldVision) was 8 months away from going live and the execs were already claiming $150MM savings for the PAST year. It could BARELY (and I'm being generous) "integrate" with an in-house ERP system and they thought it could be sold to external parties running many different types of ERP systems. Aside from GE, I've worked 12+ years for software companies, including Silicon valley Startups and it was obvious GE didn't have the culture of a software company or the ability to sell and compete in that market. Sorry, nerf gun fights don't really qualify, even if Google poaching GE talent. Still, I was suprised Jeff is on the way out less than a month later, but in retrospect, I suppose I shouldn't be.
@tgx - you need to be dirt cheap nowadays or you need to have a product that nobody else can offer. Otherwise, you run into competitors like AWS that have a billion customers and are perfectly fine with super thin margins given all the volume they have.
That's why only Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon have a shot when it comes to the Cloud - they have an immense scale and all five companies are pushing that trillion dollar market cap / valuation.
How do you compete with this? I do not think you can.
I think they are true monopolies as they have cornered everything with their size(s) - we never had this situation before (from the monopoly perspective) and our existing definition of a monopoly does not fit the companies I listed. Yet, I think they are as their size creates such a big barrier to entry and they will go ahead and buy or squash anyone why tries to enter (and matters for even a day).
GE stands no chance, we'll fold within a decade (at least on the Digital side)
Real customers will not. Power Plants are even replacing Marc VIe controls for the same reasons. GE is killing itself rapidly
As internal customers my department couldn't even afford the recurring fees. We had to abandon implementing Predix for our facility and now use Amazon AWS to get most of the functionality, sacrificing the rest due to cost. I can't imagine real customers paying GE so much for so little.