Thread regarding IBM layoffs

IBM is not gambling in the sense that its choices are random .. it is just very very very slow like we imagine dinosaurs were. Most of the things IBM is betting on are good ideas .. 10 years ago. Being late to the game probably did not matter as much in the past with physical products and services, but with internet-based products and services, the companies who decide things faster end up with a permanent and growing 10-year insurmountable head start.

I worked in IBM Research for more than 10 years until early this year and the big change that happened there (especially in the last 6) was that research that was not immediately transferrable to products was discouraged. Long term 10-to-20-years-out thinking and research was discouraged. This was happening while Microsoft and Google were expanding their long-term Research labs. So now the cupboards are bare - there is literally nothing significant happening in IBM Research that is not happening years earlier and 10x-better-funded elsewhere. I personally witnessed this change of direction and directives during the past 6 years. I also witnessed Google and Microsoft successfully recruiting most of our top talent.

I remember one vocal Distinguished Engineer banging his head against the wall of bureaucracy trying to get management to pay attention to and plan for "the cloud" .. this was back in 2007 and 2008. He gave up and quit and went to Amazon and is now comfortably retired at age 55.

IBM Cloud. Go ask some tech recruiters how relevant the IBM Cloud skill set is today.

Azure, AWS & Google are the top dogs. RedHat is an AssHat.

IBM is like a giant gambler who keeps spending big bucks on the wrong horses. It’s catching up and soon the gamble will tank us all . Demand Ginni is fired .

The Microsoft-IBM comparison is a phenomenal one. Two companies, both seeing that their core businesses were slowly dying as the markets changed, embarked on a transformation. Microsoft has wildly succeeded in that transformation, IBM has utterly failed. Microsoft went from $70B in revenue in 2011 to $110B in 2018; IBM did the opposite, going from $107B in 2011 to $79B in 2018.

What was different? Microsoft focused on new product development and didn't care if it cannibalized legacy products, made massive capital investments, made strategic acquisitions, placed huge bets, not all of which paid off (e.g., Nokia), but the ones that did paid off enormously. IBM focused on quarterly EPS and tried to get there with share buybacks, headcount reductions, non-strategic acquisitions to essentially "buy revenue", and financial engineering. SAP and Oracle have been following the same playbook as IBM and it has yielded the same dismal results. The enterprise software companies (except Microsoft) are a shell of what they were 20 years ago, it's a sad story.

How can Microsoft grow their cloud business organically and not IBM?

Remove the word "cloud" and you have described IBM's fundamental problem: For 20 years, revenue slides has been addressed almost exclusively by acquisitions. Microsoft has shown that real gains are made organically. Success is more difficult to achieve, but it sticks. Simple problems can be fixed one acquisition at a time. Platform solutions require complete design, a proper range of features and continuous delivery. Microsoft understood that they could not buy their way to platform success.

IBM's braintrust has either quit or been laid off. Now that we are faced with complex cross-domain challenges, the minds that made IBM great are working somewhere else. The organic route to success was blocked years ago.

IBM cloud is a joke. The leadership team has been negligent for years and now plans to spend $34B on Redhat. How can Microsoft grow their cloud business organically and not IBM? Interested in your commentary.

AWS, Azure, Google own cloud and SaaS, PaaS respectively.

IBM is not on the radar once again, contrary to how they try to spin it.

Microsoft delivered a platform for cloud SaaS that customers want to buy. IBM promoted several SaaS platform ideas that they tell us customers should buy.

The Microsoft CEO took a gamble by distancing Microsoft from Windows and Office. It is a gamble that paid off. It is an example of a company that re-invented itself to avoid suffering innovator's dilemma.

The IBM CEO took several gambles by suggesting mainframes make good cloud infrastructure, telling the world that they need blockchain, cobbling together unrelated ML components that were supposed to make an AI product and spending more than a year's earning on an Linux services company that has seen its best days. These gambles are not paying off. IBM is writing the brochure for innovators dilemma.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma