raggyb
Well-Known Member
My take is IBM are a shell of what they used to be. They used to be #1 and employees all ego as 'only the best of the best get to work for ibm', and now they are afraid to admit they work for IBM. Now IBM moved into big 5 accounting auditing firm which was PWC I believe, which has nada to do with tech. They spun off mainframe business which is still alive because of the idiot firms that never got off mainframe and still use Cobol. DId a little revival with Watson and maybe the linux thing but still nothing. Would not say they couldnt have come out the other side if they stuck with PCs and invested, in PC business that is, they used to be big in corporate PC business and now corporates won't touch Lenovo so Lenovo crapped the crap out of it. Corps are only Dell and HP now, afaik. Dell took it all and is doing okay. Dell had some good engineers and investment in them that's part of their success from what I observed. Not that I love Dell but they did ok. So there is no telling what IBM might have done if they stuck it out they might have HP's #2 spot now. But really what I'm saying is the cost cutting out real talent from the company is bullshit and the long game aint what CEOs play these days and that's a shame, and Samsung is giving us a line of bullshit they just can't stand the heat.They got out of a market that decimated dozens/hundreds of companies because there simply wasn't/isn't innovation in computer manufacturers — it was, and is, all about paying a fee to Microsoft for their OS and assembling the piece parts into a generic box. Some companies have made it through the gauntlet by value add of services but, lacking that, it was a "race to the bottom" to hold cost down. That was antithetical to IBM and the were wise to sell their product lines off to Lenovo.
I think they stalled a bit in the 90's but they got their mojo back when they introduced their Z series of mainframes that ran on Linux. That was an amazing combo - truly redundant systems running an essentially unlimited number of virtual machines.
Their focus is on end to end systems and software which is a completely different business than slamming together low margin computers.
My expertise is in writing business software for small businesses and workgroups in the enterprise so I really didn't follow them all that much after the early 90's.