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Comment by osullivj | Hacker News Reader

I used to work with an old IBMer who used to say "it's no accident that IBM nearly collapsed at the same time as the Soviet Union did". Lou Gerstner famously rescued IBM from oblivion by turning it into a consultancy led company, and moving the focus away from mainframes. This is just a case of IBM snaffling up the latest cool thing so they can sell consulting services.

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> ...moving the focus away from mainframes.

Actually, System z (mainframes) still accounts for a quarter of IBM's revenue and about half of its profits. [1] At least, that was the case in 2012. I suspect that hasn't changed much with IBM's recent announcement of the LinuxONE. In fact, IBM contributed significant effort get Node.js (and thereby V8) ported to s390x. [2]

[1]: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/09/ibms-mainf... [2]: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/09/ibms-mainf...

It's too painful for people to check their facts before declaring mainframes dead or something IBM is leaving. As you said, they're incredibly profitable. Same thing happened with OpenVMS, which turned out much profit for HP despite little investment. Next they'll be telling us Group Bull, Unisys, and Fujitsu are similarly scraping by in the mainframe business. And NonStop and IBM i are on verge of cancellation. And blah blah blah.

I'm sure we'll be hearing the same crap in a decade while said crap is posted via a service that imtegrates with a COBOL app on a mainframe. ;)

> the Russian decision in the late sixties to develop as their next national computer series a bit-compatible copy of the IBM 360 —the greatest American victory in the cold war!—.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD05xx/E...

Your quip reminded me of the above quote from Dijkstra!

Despite my other comment, I do regularly post that one. Hilarious. Anyone that saw better architectures (eg Burroughs) knows that he's probably right that cloning 360 wasted a prime opportunity to kick IBM's ass with technically superior, state-funded product. There's a chance they'll make a come-back in near future, though.

Which is fine, people who build things need an exit after all.

What is the connection to the Soviet Union? Were they a large IBM customer?

Both IBM and USSR were bloated, inefficient, slow moving, hierarchical, bureaucratic organisations. Gorbachev failed to save his org, despite heroic efforts. Gerstner did rescue IBM. Maybe if Gorby had saved the USSR Putin would still be working for the KGB in Berlin...

Cold War funds for department of defense and other federal departments dried up.

No, but the people who were afraid of them were :-)

Mainframes still bring in a lot of money. I actually think of IBM as being led by finance people.

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