[HN Gopher] IBM's Lost Decade
___________________________________________________________________
IBM's Lost Decade
Author : wilkystyle
Score : 142 points
Date : 2020-02-03 15:12 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.platformonomics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.platformonomics.com)
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Revenue - Down and to the right
|
| How could a revenue curve move in any other direction than to the
| right? A revenue curve that loops back on itself and starts
| moving to the left, back in time?
| TsomArp wrote:
| They key there is the down part.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Yeah so why specify 'to the right'?
| sputknick wrote:
| I've heard this term for 20+ years and never questioned it
| until just now. I think the "to the right" part is meant to
| convey that profits going up is not just a one time thing,
| but something that has, or will be happening continually
| over a period of time.
| jwegan wrote:
| "Up and to the right" is a relatively common business
| saying to indicate things are going well and that the chart
| for a metric (ex: revenue, users, etc) is going "up and to
| the right". The author made a play on this common business
| phrase by saying IBM's charts are going "down and to the
| right"
| ajb92 wrote:
| Well, conceivably, if the total value were to drop to 0 in
| a very short amount of time, it would be simply "down" (and
| the inverse, for the far more unlikely event that it
| increased a few orders of magnitude all at once and then
| flatlined, appearing to simply go "up").
| fullshark wrote:
| The phrase "up and to the right" is common in business
| discussions to indicate "good metrics." It's a play on
| that, which similarly has "to the right" superfluously in
| your opinion.
| Dirlewanger wrote:
| Because we perceive "to the right" as making
| progress/happening over time with respect to a cartesian
| coordinate-based graph.
| robocat wrote:
| Down could be a single quarter. Down and to the right implies
| many quarters or a line angled down.
| awinter-py wrote:
| also known as 'up and to the left'
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > up and to the left
|
| The x axis is time. How can you move to the left, back in
| time?
| babkayaga wrote:
| You can move back in time using this device we call
| "memory". Up and to the left - value grows as you consider
| earlier values. Up and to the right - value grows as you
| consider newer values. Yes considering newer values after
| older ones is a reasonable default but it's not completely
| redundant to specify that's what's meant.
| astrea wrote:
| Have you ever done one of those DNA kits? I feel as though
| you might have some Vulcan in you.
| RookyNumbas wrote:
| Hint: it's a joke.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You are free to read a graph on any direction you want.
| burkaman wrote:
| I think it's just a throwaway reference to "back and to the
| left", a frequently parodied line from the movie JFK.
| soneca wrote:
| If that's it, you just answered my (same as GP's) permanent
| confusion for people describing the "hockey stick" chart as
| "up and to the right". Why not just "up"?? Thanks for that!
| draw_down wrote:
| Come on
| jhallenworld wrote:
| IBM is trapped by their very wealthy legacy customers [banks,
| insurance companies, governments and a few fortune 100 stores].
| IBM certainly has the talent to create new products, but unless
| they appeal to those customers, the effort is pointless. The
| existing customers are so wealthy that it's not worth the effort
| of the IBM sales machine to target anyone else.
|
| When IBM buys a company, it's not to get new customers. It's only
| to get products that their legacy customers have been buying from
| someone else.
| jngreenlee wrote:
| In context, this explains a big of the reason why they need
| changes, which are now in place:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonobacon/2020/01/31/jim-whiteh...
| derefr wrote:
| It's interesting to talk about what "IBM" has been doing, because
| after all the A&M IBM has done this last decade, they've actually
| got plenty of "activity" to their name. Just, activity that was
| previously known under the names of Softlayer, Cognos, Redhat...
|
| Go to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
| and sort the table there by value, descending. "IBM" is a
| shorthand for more (un-dissolved!) subsidiaries at this point
| than GE or Samsung.
|
| IBM itself is just a consulting "solution provider" company that
| provides "solutions" in terms of the products and services of its
| subsidiaries. They're never going to look like they're on the
| cutting edge of some space, unless that's what one of their
| (equally-stodgy) enterprise clients wants to pay them to do. (And
| even then, why build when you can buy? IMHO IBM would only ever
| build a new technology at this point if there was no existing
| company out there in the market, _with_ that tech IP, that they
| could just acquire.)
|
| Certainly, there's the Watson AI lab, though I don't think
| anyone's expecting much of it at this point; nor, importantly,
| _was_ anyone inside IBM _ever_ expecting much of it. Watson (the
| lab specifically, not the brand strategy of calling all their
| cloud OLAP SaaS products "Watson") is more a nod to their
| clients to say "of course we're looking into AI", and a pool of
| people competent enough that they could _clone_ the existing ML
| approach of one of their competitors if one of their clients
| demanded it.
|
| IBM _could_ be a really innovative company if they rearranged
| their talent pool, certainly. But innovation--getting ahead of
| the market and so needing to educate the market on the problem
| their products solve--hasn 't been IBM's business model since the
| 1950s. IBM makes money by listening to clients' "unique" needs,
| and then meeting them with "custom" solutions at low CapEx cost,
| by using an ever-larger flywheel of existing solutions pre-tuned
| to _almost_ fit every possible business use-case.
| woodandsteel wrote:
| If IBM has been following a wise strategy, how come its
| financial performance has been so poor?
| bonzini wrote:
| > innovation hasn't been IBM's business model since the 1950s
|
| The 360 was innovative in pretty much every respect. In the 90s
| IBM was the only one of the big Unix vendors to bet on Linux
| and open source.
| Covzire wrote:
| I wonder if we'll see IBM get into video games before too long.
| Or buying a lesser known streaming company like Mixer? It would
| seem like an odd fit, but it wouldn't be too surprising.
| larrik wrote:
| I mean, at one point (GameCube/PS2/XBox era) IBM was making
| the chips for all 3 major consoles. I think they've been in
| video games for a long time.
| Nursie wrote:
| PS3 I think (Cell), and Xbox 360 (tri-core Power chip
| IIRC).
|
| Was the PS2 one of theirs as well?
| chungus_khan wrote:
| No, the PS2 was MIPS. IBM did do the GameCube, Wii, Xbox
| 360, PS3, Wii U though.
| larrik wrote:
| Yup, I was a generation too early
| bsder wrote:
| IBM specifically did a custom version of PowerPC (the 602)
| for 3DO for their video game consoles.
|
| IBM has been in video game hardware for a long time.
| aquova wrote:
| Mixer was bought out by Microsoft a few years ago
| Bombthecat wrote:
| That's how unknown it is :)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's funny. IBM is one of very few companies that are producing
| not one but two of their own CPU architectures and ecosystems
| of machines around them.
| rbanffy wrote:
| And what CPUs these are...
| mburns wrote:
| POWER and the Z Series?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_microprocessors#IBM
| PaulHoule wrote:
| PowerPC and the z-Architecture (successor to the 360, 370,
| 390, ...)
| Bombthecat wrote:
| They don't do consulting anymore. Or service.
|
| They outsource everything to sub contractors (they still apply
| to rfi and rfp though and win sometimes) but won't have the
| resources to do the job.
| Lutzb wrote:
| I really don't know where you get your information from but
| this is demonstrably wrong IBM GBS and GTS still ploy hundred
| of thousands of people.
| vbhavsar wrote:
| I don't know why people overlook the progress IBM seems to have
| made in the quantum computing world. Perhaps not as impressive
| as Google's progress but impressive none the less.
| derefr wrote:
| For me personally, it was because even from the inside at
| IBM, you wouldn't hear much about what the quantum folks are
| doing if you were doing general tech. They really are in
| their own little world. I don't _think_ they were even in the
| whole-IBM Slack team, though they might just have been
| security-compartmentalized with ACLs.
| q_eng_anon wrote:
| its compartmentalized - even within the q team
|
| although qiskit is open source so literally anyone can look
| at the GitHub and get a pretty good idea of what's going on
| jimbokun wrote:
| That's great and all, but will that be a product with real
| revenue in the forseeable future?
|
| Could be Watson all over again. Amazing technology demo, but
| no viable business plan behind it.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Watson wasn't an amazing technology demo.
| gowld wrote:
| Watson/Jeopardy
|
| It was certainly a stye in the eye for Google ("organize
| the world's information and make it universally
| accessible and useful"), whether facbricated by
| marketing/advertising or not.
| abraxas wrote:
| Was Watson just smoke and mirrors? Have there been other
| systems in the NLP space that eclipsed it? Genuinely
| asking because I don't know much background behind the
| story of Watson's rise and fall.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Watson didn't rise or fall, it was the centerpiece in
| IBM's marketing campaign, which worked for a while before
| they moved on. It never got beyond or matched the state
| of the art in anything, that wasn't the point, it got the
| name "Watson" on TV.
|
| IBM wanted to prove that they employed smart people, so
| they hired some smart people and had them write a
| computer program to play Jeopardy. Did it matter that it
| had nothing to do with anything they were selling?
| Perhaps only IBM has those figures.
| abraxas wrote:
| OK fine but there was _some_ non trivial technology
| behind the system that won the Jeopardy game. What I'm
| asking is whether what seemed like the state of the art
| NLP system at the time got eclipsed by newer and better
| systems or whether the whole thing was never really a
| state of the art NLP system to begin with.
| noelsusman wrote:
| State of the art NLP system isn't a very meaningful term.
| You can't really say that Watson was "better" than
| Google's NLP systems at the time because they were
| solving different problems.
|
| In general, what they did was not trivial, but it also
| wasn't revolutionary. Some of it was novel, but novel in
| the sense that it applied specifically to the problem
| they were trying to solve. It had little impact on the
| technology behind what IBM eventually tried to sell as
| Watson.
|
| Anybody with a bucket of money could have built the same
| thing at the time. The impressive part was IBM figuring
| out that it would be worth spending a bucket of money on.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The problem with Watson is that they don't have a
| business case. IBM sent salespeople to big customers with
| big problems and tried to find things to fix. In some
| cases, they did. But most of the time, the insurance
| companies, government agencies, etc they do business with
| scratched their heads and didn't do anything. Learning
| new things about their data might be seen as a threat to
| whatever enterprise bullshit they do!
|
| The problem is you have companies like Google, Microsoft,
| Amazon, Apple, Facebook, etc _have_ problems that this
| tech solves. It 's easier to come up with a product with
| a problem that you understand. I can ask Google Photos or
| Siri to show me pictures of my dog in the snow in 2015,
| and they do. So I give Google & Apple money to store my
| crap. Google and Facebook use AI with all of the data
| they hoover up to peddle products to me. My grandparents
| get ads for depends, I get ads for drones, Google and
| Facebook make $.
|
| Now, companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google can go
| to companies that were prospected by IBM with solutions.
| Microsoft is minting money with ATP, because enterprise
| security teams suck. Amazon is selling creepy facial
| recognition to people, because people see it on TV, have
| a Ring doorbell, and want the capability. Google is
| selling GIS solutions, etc based on work done on maps.
| sgt101 wrote:
| I think it was fantastic, modern NLP could do much more
| (if put together with the cleverness of the Watson
| pipeline) and it's a pot of gold if IBM ever stop trying
| to apply it in healthcare and apply their brains to how
| it could work in customer service (for example).
|
| Note : I am aware that there are "Watson" products that
| claim to be this - but they aren't because they are MBA's
| ideas of what the best route to selling crap to the
| unwary. If IBM had appointed someone with a clue and
| given them 10x the R&D budget for the gameshow to deliver
| a decent product I reckon they'd have got (at least)
| 100x. But... oh no.. promise 30x for 1x and get f-all.x^2
|
| It's an epic fail
| simias wrote:
| It was an amazing demo, as far as marketing was
| concerned. Now whether the technology behind it was as
| revolutionary as they made it sound, that's probably more
| controversial.
| jedieaston wrote:
| A ML system that could play Jeopardy (well) was
| interesting as the layman didn't know the technology had
| gotten that far.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The "progress" made is entirely marketing and will have no
| impact on making quantum computing a reality for individual
| users.
| bronson wrote:
| Two reasons I can think of:
|
| - "seems to have made" is important. A decade ago, Watson
| seemed to be a lot of progress in the AI world.
|
| - Where's the revenue?
| StylusEater wrote:
| Revenue is but a single dimension when attempting to
| quantify "progress."
| MR4D wrote:
| Watson has become IBM's Clippy....it never came close to
| living up to expectations.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _They 're never going to look like they're on the cutting edge
| of some space_
|
| I don't follow big iron as closely as I'd like, but I was under
| the impression that IBM is considered pretty cutting edge when
| it comes to mainframes.
| dralley wrote:
| That's somewhat narrowly defined considering they're really
| the only remaining producer of mainframes. I'm not sure if
| that's literally true but it may as well be.
|
| There are some things that mainframes are legitimately better
| at, and some things that POWER is better at than x86, and so
| on. AMD and Intel benefit from incredible economies of scale
| that IBM could never dream of, and that's mostly where IBM
| loses -- the price is a lot higher and the volume a lot lower
| on the IBM side.
| Angostura wrote:
| I suppose its worth noting that IBM folks received a record
| 9,262 U.S. patents in 2019 - the most patents ever awarded to a
| U.S. company and the 27th consecutive year of it grabbing the
| no.1 patent spot.
|
| No idea how valuable or inovative any of these patents are, but
| I think its important to note when discussing: "They're never
| going to look like they're on the cutting edge of some space"
| bluGill wrote:
| Appearing on the cutting edge to enterprise clients is
| important to IBM. That doesn't mean they are on the cutting
| edge (they might or might not be). IBM's large pool of
| patents is something they can advertise to clients. Most
| companies don't see their patents as valuable, and thus don't
| patent as much stuff.
|
| I've worked with former IBM people - all (or some it seems)
| of them have a plaque of whatever their first patent was.
| When they talk about it they admit it was a trivial invention
| that is too specific to be of much use outside the one
| project (thus there is no value in keeping it from
| competitors). IBM encourages patenting everything and has
| people looking for things to patent. Most other companies
| only patent things that are unique and worth the costs.
| (keeping from competitors, licensing to competitors, or
| keeping competitors from patenting it and stopping your use)
| acomjean wrote:
| I worked at IBM Research (Yorktown Hieghts, Last century,
| assisting infrastructure for research).
|
| They spent 6 Billion Dollars on research that year (late
| 90s)
|
| But Its true, IBM Values patents quite heavily. You can see
| some of them they printed as wall paper in the lobby (Along
| with mechanical calculators and models of some of daVinci's
| machines.)
|
| But they also have "Trade Secrets" which are things they
| think they're competitors won't figure out and if you don't
| patent it you aren't telling the world how its done. I
| think some of the chip chemicals and processes for working
| with silicon wafers were to be classified as such.
|
| They seemed always to be pushing the researchers to make
| something they could sell..
|
| As an aside, IBM Yorktown is an oddly round building..
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/place/IBM+Thomas+J.+Watson+Rese
| a...
| rtkwe wrote:
| I'm really waiting for the day that software patents are
| finally struck down and we can stop this farce of
| pretending software patents are actually useful and
| valuable beyond being a cudgel in legal battles.
| vikramkr wrote:
| Being a cudgel in legal battles is quite a lot of value
| though, that's basically the point and is how patents are
| meant to support and reward innovation.
| ouid wrote:
| youve gone from point a to point b rather discontinuously
| with this argument
| vikramkr wrote:
| It's not discontinuous - that's just the theory behind
| patents. Patents give inventors a legal "cudgel" as the
| commenter before put it, which makes innovation more
| profitable. Patents are just a legal construct, the idea
| is that having a patent on an invention gives you access
| to legal tools to protect a temporary monopoly which
| makes innovation more profitable, so you don't have to
| worry about investing money in innovation and then losing
| all of your profits because of copycats. However well
| that actually works and whether or not it ends up being a
| net positive for innovation is a different question, but
| all a patent is is a legal tool to stop others from using
| or making money off of your innovation, as enforced
| through lawsuits in the court system.
| rtkwe wrote:
| There's a second part to the idea of patents though they
| protect innovations with the idea that once they expire
| other people can implement them and software patents fail
| abjectly at that second. There's no meat the the
| implementation, all modern software patents seem to boil
| down to connect a client to a server and display the
| results on an interface. There were some genuinely useful
| patents back in the 80s it looks like for stuff like MP3
| encoding.
|
| Also there should be some additional value to people not
| just companies for the government to be granting legal
| monopolies, and it should also be restricted to things
| that are actually implementable not extremely vague
| system level diagrams.
| vikramkr wrote:
| From what I understand, those sorts of vague software
| patents are far far harder to get today - in theory they
| never should have been granted. Unfortunately, mistakes
| were made, but in recent years the legal system is
| catching up to that, and hopefully as those older patents
| expire newer patents along those lines won't be granted
|
| "On June 19, 2014 the United States Supreme Court ruled
| in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International that 'merely
| requiring generic computer implementation fails to
| transform [an] abstract idea into a patent-eligible
| invention'"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_Unit
| ed_...
| xkjkls wrote:
| Software patents end up being so vague that basically
| every large company is violating some in some way. They
| don't get in legal battles with eachother often because
| the resulting legal decision will be somewhat random and
| risks huge retaliation in counter-suits.
| Angostura wrote:
| These aren't only software patents
| rtkwe wrote:
| I'm not knocking them for their materials or process
| patents for some of their remaining R&D arms but the
| majority probably are software patents which I think are
| 95-99% unusable garbage outside of a legal fight.
| Generally software patents are too broad and don't
| contain enough implementation detail to actually use them
| once they do expire which is one of the important parts
| of the bargain for patent protection initially.
| bluGill wrote:
| I've seen some awful code that I wished was patented just
| so that nobody would be able to make that mistake...
| stuzenz wrote:
| This might be of interest:
|
| I just finished (a light) editing of an English (machine
| translated) version of a book for someone I have a lot of
| respect for who is a Japan-based mentor of mine - Hiroshi
| Maruyama had 26 years in IBM research, eventually as the
| director of IBM Tokyo Research Labs.
|
| In one chapter of the book he provides a view across a
| possible way to fix the patent system which I found
| interesting. It referenced ideas from the following paper
| - https://www.ibm.com/ibm/files/S376023B46442F89/building
| _a_ne...
|
| Some of the key points of the IP marketplace were - fees
| for the licensee fee would be set upfront; - the patentee
| would pay a % value to the government as a tax; - if the
| patentee wanted to use the patent exclusively, a high
| licensing fee could be set, but that would also result in
| a higher tax being due to be paid.
|
| The approach was to dis-incentivize bad actors putting
| monopolies on products via patents. It would also
| encourage higher utility value from patents under this
| system.
|
| Another interesting concept Maruyama's book covered was
| LOT networks used to fight against Trolls. -
| https://lotnet.com/
|
| The idea with the Lot network was that if a patent did
| get rights to a patent from a member of the lot network,
| If any of the patents from members falls into the hands
| of a patent troll, all other members are automatically
| granted a free license of the patent.
|
| The book covers themes on how to do research in corporate
| organizations (the audience focus remains with Japanese
| researchers/students) and has some interesting
| discussions.
|
| I will provide a link to the book when it is available
| (if there is interest).
|
| The book is an updated version of this Japanese book: htt
| ps://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/product/4764903822/ref=dbs_a_def
| ...
| rtkwe wrote:
| Maybe, it certainly sounds much better at a glance than
| the current system though there's tough stuff like how to
| set that value in such a way that independent inventors
| aren't forced to partner with a large company in order to
| use the patent system. I think some reforms like that
| combined with a much stricter definition of "patent-able"
| for some categories and/or better challenge mechanisms.
| Getting a bad patent thrown out due to prior art is still
| quite expensive and trying to evaluate if a patent is
| non-obvious is quite difficult to litigate.
| gowld wrote:
| Is IBM unique in its patent techniques? If so, why?
|
| Top patenters of 2017:
|
| IBM
|
| Samsung
|
| LG
|
| Intel
|
| Canon(!)
|
| Alphabet
|
| Qualcomm (!)
|
| Toyota
|
| Microsoft
|
| Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (fab for AMD and other
| chip designs)
| saxonww wrote:
| My guess is that these companies are a lot more
| aggressive internally about getting their employees to
| author patent submissions. They either actively screen
| code submissions and projects for patentable ideas, make
| patent authorship a condition of advancement, or
| otherwise tie authorship to performance reviews in a
| meaningful way.
|
| Companies I've worked for have teams that facilitate
| employee patent submissions, and they will tell you why
| patenting is important to the company. They have had some
| kind of bonus structure so that you get rewarded if you
| submit a successful patent. But they pay well enough
| otherwise that, unless you're personally motivated to see
| your name attached to patents, it's just not worth the
| effort.
|
| To put this another way: the patents you author as an
| employee of a company are probably not that valuable to
| you. But, because of the potential legal protections they
| offer, they are very valuable to your employer. I think
| the companies that are more successful in having high
| patent counts are doing more to align employee interest
| with corporate interest w/r/t patents.
| bluGill wrote:
| There is a continuum. IBM patents everything. The other
| companies find patents less useful (for whatever reason)
| and so they are more careful about what they will spend
| money patenting. I've made several "inventions" that I'm
| sure any of the companies on your list would have
| patented, but since I don't work for them I don't have
| any patents.
| senderista wrote:
| I've thrown all my patent plaques in the trash, twice, when
| I changed jobs. There was nothing there to be remotely
| proud of.
| lolkkhhty wrote:
| As an ex-IBMer, I can tell you they really incentivize
| patents. IIRC, you get $1000+ on your first patent and pretty
| decent money on subsequent patents. Many employees form 4-5
| person teams where each member basically work on their own
| patent but their name is listed on all patent applications
| submitted by their team. This way even if 4 out of 5 patents
| are rejected, team still has 1 approved patent and everyone
| in team wins some money.
| zaat wrote:
| If you listen to Lin Sun interview on Google's Kubernetes
| Podcast you hear that she have the title Master Inventor.
| Since she is interviewed under the title of Istio I was sure
| she invented some interesting techincal stuff in that field.
| You don't have to wait too long for (at least what I find as)
| the disappointing explanation of what does the title mean,
| why it exists and what the results are.
|
| In short, there's incentive as well as assistance in filling
| up patents, they don't seem to discriminate on basis of
| usability, feasibility or anything else. They do give bigger
| bonuses for patents that are in one of the fields considered
| strategic for the company.
|
| Listening to it was somewhere between amusing to depressing:
|
| https://kubernetespodcast.com/episode/086-invention-ibm-
| isti...
| notwrong wrote:
| I have a portfolio where I long term short companies headed by
| diversity female CEOs. I made a lot on PCG and some in IBM.
| There's a convenient Gender Diversity ETF SHE
| https://www.etf.com/SHE that can be used for reference. Hopefully
| before this post gets flagged by the Komsomol members here some
| readers will benefit.
| dralley wrote:
| How much did you lose on AMD the past few years?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| LOL. This is hysterical and brilliant but not aggressive
| enough:
|
| "The fund evaluates the 1000 largest US firms for the ratio of
| women on the board of directors and in executive positions
| (defined as Sr. VP or higher). Companies ranking in the top 10%
| in each sector are included in the portfolio, with the caveat
| that each firm must have at least one woman on its board or as
| CEO."
|
| It should be top 5% or so. Also having a single woman on a
| board of directors is not aggressive enough. Hopefully the 10%
| or 5% limit throws out such companies.
|
| I see you're doing the shorting yourself. Too bad that's note a
| purchasable fund.
| benibela wrote:
| Long-term short? How does that work? I thought short was called
| short, because it is not long term
| q_eng_anon wrote:
| waitttt so you're shorting companies based purely on
| 'diversity'? and you claim it's worked..?
| jsty wrote:
| Whilst I harbour significant doubt that simply shorting
| companies with newly appointed female CEOs would be an
| effective way of exploiting it, the glass cliff effect [0] is
| a known phenomena whereby female leaders are more likely to
| be appointed in times of crisis.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
| MrBeansForReal wrote:
| yeah, because they stand away from risk. Looks like a good
| idea in 2008-2010 (that's why Ginnie). Not as much when you
| have had bull market for over a decade.
| pscz wrote:
| IBM should give IBM Cloud to the Red Hat people and rebrand it as
| Red Hat Cloud.
|
| Red Hat is the only subsidiary of IBM that is respected by the
| developer community. The rest of IBM has a very MBAsque
| reputation.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I'm really surprised IBM doesn't offer a cloud product based on
| LinuxONE machines. These are ridiculously fast machines that
| are probably cheaper to build and run that the equivalent
| capacity in OCP x86 "boxes". And only IBM can have them.
| wmf wrote:
| IBM should _not_ rebrand bad products as Red Hat (redwashing?
| hatwashing?). Maybe Red Hat could come up with a better public
| cloud than IBM but that would be a long-term project.
| rilindo wrote:
| Rebranding won't help, unless IBM actually put in the CapEx
| behind their cloud:
|
| https://www.platformonomics.com/2018/05/follow-the-capex-sep...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| What does IBM sell nowadays?
| Shivetya wrote:
| well if you are a member of any of their large user groups you
| would be asking why has IBM forsaken them? They really went off
| the rails in a bad way seeming to have forgotten their hardware
| base in z, i, and even p, to where you had to look long and
| hard to find mention of any of those platforms during
| announcements.
|
| Going to have to wait and see if IBM changes direction but last
| year wasn't fun as they began the shutdown of their
| developerworks wikis that had so much user contributed material
| and this change came out of the blue with little warning. that
| left even groups in IBM struggling to preserve knowledge built
| up over the years
| Pandabob wrote:
| Services
| rhexs wrote:
| Outsourcing, or as another comment called it, "services".
| wstrange wrote:
| Otherwise known as "Your mess for less"
| solotronics wrote:
| IBM Cloud. Baremetal servers on demand, containers, VMs,
| serverless, etc etc. Usual cloud stuff. On top of this
| infrastructure we have built and integrated quite a lot of
| products. Not as many as AWS but still a significant number of
| storage, database, serverless, and other products. I am an
| engineer at IBM Cloud and this is my personal commentary.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Who buys this other than their legacy customers?
| senderista wrote:
| Softlayer was great. IBM Cloud is terrible. I tried
| provisioning a bare metal server a few months ago and gave up
| a couple hours in. Packet had me up and running in minutes.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Cover your ass. If you're in a position to spend a lot of
| money, and you hire IBM, and they mess it up, you get to say
| "Hey, I did my due diligence by hiring IBM".
| robocat wrote:
| Except there is now a counter-current where the project
| _fails_ due to IBM and people would say "what did you expect,
| you hired IBM" (e.g. some huge government software projects).
| 2sk21 wrote:
| > And the big bet on a ridiculously over-hyped Watson could make
| sense if you saw incomplete and underperfoming products as merely
| the top of a consulting sales funnel
|
| I worked on Watson Assistant for a few years and it's not a bad
| product at all compared to the competitors but, sadly, I have to
| agree with the above assessment. It was completely overhyped.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Is there even a significant market for such a product?
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| Since someone else addressed call centers, there's a million
| managers in blue collar fields that would kill for some
| software that can take in all their purchases and work orders
| (and those of everyone else who bought the software) and spit
| out insights like "don't piss your money away on the
| expensive grease Reddit told you to use, machines running the
| cheap stuff don't seem to cost anymore to operate". These are
| the kinds of things they could find out themselves if they
| wanted but can't justify spending the man hours.
| 2sk21 wrote:
| Not really until language understanding improves
| substantially. All of the chatbot kits that I'm familiar with
| discard the bulk of the information in the user's first
| utterance.
| [deleted]
| wenc wrote:
| There is, but it's also served by a saturated market full of
| startups that are far more innovative than IBM. And much more
| inexpensive.
|
| My experience of IBM's software products is that they are
| slightly above average, comprehensively documented, but
| completely out of touch with market pricing. I wouldn't say
| they are affordable even for fairly large enterprises -- the
| bang for buck is extremely poor.
|
| IBM is the choice for large, price-insensitive, risk-averse
| companies and bureaucracies. You can almost always do better
| than IBM.
| tootie wrote:
| I have a dumb idea. IBM should release an Echo/Alexa
| competitor with Watson branding. It should be brightly
| colored, made of metal with large-print buttons and be
| preprogrammed with older, male voice. Then they market it as
| home automation for Boomers.
|
| "Watson, open the lights."
|
| "Watson, how much of the green pill do I take?"
|
| "Watson, play Lou Dobbs."
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Buy Wolfram and integrate alpha into the Watson knowledge
| base.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| This is a better business strategy than the one they had
| the last decade.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Yes. Chatbots (or "Virtual Assistants") for handling routine
| customer care inquiries. IBM Watson Assistant is the leader
| in this increasingly crowded (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and
| dozens of startups are competing with them) space. The tech-
| savvy may look down at the current state of "AI chatbots" but
| large enterprises in all industries currently spend a fortune
| on staffing call centers that predominantly handle questions
| like "I forgot my password can you reset it?", "I lost my
| bill, can you send me another copy?", and "I'd like to sign
| up/cancel/modify a service". Chatbots work well enough to
| handle 30-40% of these types of inquiries at a far lower cost
| than a human (who is mainly just reading a script anyway).
| sgt101 wrote:
| All of those 30-40% problems you cite are actually
| arguements for spending a bit on improved FAQ's, website
| processes and IVR's. Businesses are likely to react to a
| successful pitch for a solution in that space with a bit of
| cash to do it tactically. For chatbots to become a thing
| they will have to jointly solve problems with customers,
| and they can't just now...
| closeparen wrote:
| Paying an infrastructure provider and a managed k8s / other
| "cloud" API vendor separately is actually very reasonable. There
| is no good reason those two things should be tightly coupled.
| Amazon should not get to charge a markup on hardware because of
| the software that runs on it. That's a regression not only from
| open source, but from shrink-wrapped proprietary software too.
| Putting the cloud back in shrink-wrap world could add a lot of
| value: buy commodity capacity, still write "cloud" applications
| for it, split the hardware savings with IBM.
|
| To compete, Amazon will have to either lower its markup or
| innovate in proprietary hardware (as it's starting to do with
| Graviton2) to provide value-added services that software on
| commodity hardware can't effectively replicate. And IBM basically
| invented that game, so good luck.
|
| Not to say IBM is capable of executing it, but it's an
| interesting strategy.
| wmf wrote:
| Speaking of k8s markup, AWS only charges for the masters and
| they recently cut those prices by 50%. This problem doesn't
| exist.
| tomjohnneill wrote:
| I remember reading an article back in 2011, a puff piece about
| IBM in the Economist for the company's 100th birthday:
| https://www.economist.com/briefing/2011/06/09/1100100-and-co...
|
| It's pretty interesting to look at some of the quotes from that
| article now:
|
| - "As IBM enters its second century in good health, far younger
| IT giants, such as Cisco Systems, Intel, Microsoft and Nokia, are
| grappling with market shifts that threaten to make them much less
| relevant."
|
| - "By 2015 the firm wants its earnings per share almost to
| double, to "at least" $20." (It was actually $11, and kept
| falling from there)
|
| - "given the complexity of the world and how much of it is still
| to be digitised, IBM's human platform looks unlikely to reach its
| limits soon. Perhaps not for another 100 years."
| british_india wrote:
| IBM went on the cheap and made their shop virtually all Indians.
| tabtab wrote:
| After getting behind, why should it be assumed automatic to "just
| catch up" in cloud? Microsoft fell behind mobile and never caught
| up despite pouring billions on it. Same with Google and social
| networks. Oracle also got behind in the cloud race and will
| probably also lose it all.
|
| The early bird gets the worm, stop blaming the CEO.
|
| Although "Watson" seems a PHB toy to trick investors or job
| seekers into thinking it had magic AI.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Microsoft was not "early" on cloud, and came back into
| relevance (perhaps more than Google, really, in this one case).
| The early bird (Friendster, Commodore Computing, VisiCalc) does
| not always get the worm.
| geodel wrote:
| > The early bird gets the worm, stop blaming the CEO.
|
| Indeed. But oversized financial rewards and credits to CEO is
| to compensate the blame.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| > Oracle
|
| Another perfect example, along with SAP.
|
| In the 1990s and 2000s, Oracle and SAP used to win on the basis
| of their "fully integrated suite of business applications" that
| they contrasted with the "best of breed" approach that (they
| claimed) would cost more to integrate than they delivered in
| additional value. However, over the last 10 years, Oracle and
| SAP went on a buying spree scooping up all those best of breed
| enterprise applications and then failed to integrate them with
| their core offerings, creating the same problem they claimed to
| be addressing. At the same time, R&D spend on organic product
| innovation slumped.
|
| Buying up the competition isn't the panacea many tech companies
| seem to think it is.
| tabtab wrote:
| It sounds like it "worked" from their financial standpoint,
| at least for a while. You don't have to compete if you buy up
| competitors. Remember when MS bought FoxPro? Customer choice
| and prices may be a different story.
| zzzeek wrote:
| the ratio of super-trolly-know-it-all (Red Hat is just a
| "proprietary Kubernetes distribution", really? do you even know
| what Red Hat does?) to "no 500 server error on my blog" is pretty
| high here
| kediz wrote:
| Now the site get's error 500
| cryptoz wrote:
| No mention of their acquisition of the Weather Channel's digital
| properties, or any other M&A for that matter. Hard to see how
| this decade was lost for them, rather than a significant
| investment into the future.
| wmf wrote:
| IBM has had a continuous pipeline of acquisitions over decades,
| but where is the money? At some point the profit from the older
| acquisitions has to cancel out the cost of the newer ones and
| that isn't apparent for IBM.
| throwaway55554 wrote:
| > IBM has had a continuous pipeline of acquisitions over
| decades, but where is the money?
|
| They used it for stock buybacks.
| coredog64 wrote:
| ...and?
|
| This whole idea that stock buybacks are necessarily bad
| needs to die. Can they be bad? Sure. But there are valid
| reasons to pursue a strategy of buybacks vs. dividends.
| TomMarius wrote:
| And nothing, the question was
|
| > but where is the money?
| berbec wrote:
| Hugged
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20200203151544/https://www.platfo...
| [deleted]
| why_only_15 wrote:
| In the first-approximation analysis of stock buybacks, they keep
| the share price the same but reduce the market cap of the company
| by however much was bought. This is known and intended. If $55B
| of their $95B drop in market cap is simply by returning cash to
| the investors, that isn't such a bad thing.
| villahousut wrote:
| That's incorrect. A company's market cap includes any cash the
| company has. Buying stock means spending that cash but
| increasing the value of the stock by an equal amount.
|
| Stock buybacks don't affect market cap.
| femto113 wrote:
| I worry that addiction to stock buybacks is a terminal disease
| for companies like IBM. Imagine what $65B invested in R&D over
| the last eight years could have yielded in the future instead of
| being poured down a financial sewer.
| robocat wrote:
| Stock buybacks are yields for shareholders the same as
| dividends (just with different tax implications) - definitely
| not "down the sewer".
|
| Most companies have a limit to the amount of R&D they can do
| before running into a wall where the payback becomes
| unprofitable (for complicated reasons).
| throwaway55554 wrote:
| They used to be illegal. They should be illegal again. If they
| were, then that $65B _would_ have been invested in R &D (and in
| their employees!).
| cpwright wrote:
| Or paid as dividends? Stock buybacks are in part a way to
| financial engineer around dividends and capital gains being
| realized and taxed differently.
| robocat wrote:
| The money would have been returned as dividends instead. For-
| profit companies are not intended to exist just to spend all
| profits on themselves (although Amazon is one obvious counter
| example amongst many).
| aphextim wrote:
| One thing IBM has been working on is trying to solve the issue of
| worldwide remittances and global payments by using Stellar (XLM)
| and their block-chain solution to bridge various assets and fiat
| currencies.
|
| https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/solutions/world-wire
|
| https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pd...
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