The only good thing to come out of IBM in years is their Hyperscan regex library and unsurprisingly they don't market it at all or build practical applications with it
Conventional wisdom is that, in a free market, a single corporation will grow to rule everything. But that never seems to pan out.
Part of the reason is that the larger an organization gets, the more inefficient and bureaucratic it gets, the less it is able to adapt. See "The Innovator's Dilemma", a book everyone interested in business should read.
The economic calculation problem, described my Mises in his criticism of centrally planned state economies, starts rearing its head in large firms as well [1], leading to the inefficiencies you mentioned.
[1] https://fee.org/articles/economic-calculation-in-the-corpora...
I've concluded that the leadership of IBM is what blows, and the C level offices should be gutted and replaced with whatever good engineers remain.
I've seen leadership make or break every organization I've been a part of
The issue with MS isn't whether or not they can build a quality mobile OS (they can), but rather it's whether or not MS can build an ecosystem with enough buy-in from companies to build apps and services.
I'm sad to see MS do so poorly with their mobile OS, considering how good it is.
I think there might be a titanic fight shaping up in the economy to build out and secure ecosystems in a more Net-centric future. The WalMart diktats to truckers to not drive Amazon loads are just opening salvos in this war, for example.
I see healthy, vibrant ecosystems with a bidirectional value exchange as a way for very large companies to mitigate much of the damage inflicted by their own size. Unfortunately, most large companies are trying their damnedest to build out ecosystems as command and control bot networks, and see it only as a profit source to unidirectionally squeeze. That's tempting because it's so easy, but it means your command and control decisions must be better and more timely than the ecosystem's wisdom of crowds, or you'll suffer the consequences.
But instead they wanted a piece of the consumer app market so badly that they rebooted their platform 3-4 times chasing an impossible dream.
A phone that works great with corporate networks, allows for editing Word and Excel documents, could have gone very far a few years ago. Even getting corporate app developers to port their apps to Windows phone would have been easier than chasing Zynga down.
This article[1] seems to run counter to your intuition:
> In the fourth quarter of 2016, more than 432 million smartphones were sold, according to a report published on Wednesday by the research firm Gartner. Of those, just 207,900 were BlackBerry devices running its own operating system.
> That gives the Canadian smartphone company a share of the overall phone market of less than a single percentage point. To be precise, it's 0.0481%.
> Even when you include BlackBerry's devices running Android, its numbers are still incredibly low. Last year, CEO John Chen said the company sold only about 400,000 devices in the second quarter.
Blackberry's market share is much nearer my own (i.e. 0 phones manufactured or sold) than it is Apple's or Google's.
[1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/blackberry-smartphone-markets...
The list of Dow components is a particularly compelling study. It firms up in the 1920s and 1930s, and is relatively stable through the 1950s, then starts turning over at an accelerating pace.
See also Deloitte's "Shift Index". A Forbes writer has covered this for years. A long-term secular decline dating to the mid-1960s. Measuring return on invested capital.
I'll second that - both Azure and Surface are best-in-class.
> Azure is an absolute joy to use and administer compared to IBM Bluemix.
Note to other readers: although slightly tangential, these two comments do not actually disagree or contradict each other.
I spent some time recently diving into Azure ML Studio. It's a rough product still, with a lot of opportunity for optimizations/better UX.
I reckon the administration is much nicer, and probably closer to the designers/architects' UX understanding.
E.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM#1969:_Antitrust...
See "Titan" by Chernow.
The extreme scenario doesn't pan out - we don't end up with one eternal corporation that owns all capital. But certainly it pans out in a more realistic scale of size and time; there are and have been plenty of monopolies in many industries, and the overwhelming power and influence of large corporations, and the damage that power and influence does, is well documented.
Which is a symptom of publicly traded companies, right? It creates this weird system where finding a niche and serving it reliably year in and year out is considered failure; you're only succeeding if you're constantly growing, which means you inevitably collapse under your own weight.
Just today I had a 10-minute chat with one of my colleagues from marketing about AliExpress. I live and work in Eastern Europe, and almost all the people who do online sales rely on a Chinese company like AliExpress. Some of those people were using the UK as their source of buying merchandise until a couple of years ago, not anymore, it's all China now. The US (and the UK&Ireland) are losing big on this because Amazon's stock-price is blinding them. IMHO Amazon is going to hit a wall in terms of online sales sooner rather than later and the only thing that will be left to save them will be AWS.
IBM's management believed shareholder value was important, in about the same way Bernie Madoff believed his investor's well-being was important. Which is to say, not at all in actuality.
IBM's management was negligent in regards to shareholder value in almost every way possible.
Believing shareholder value was so important, would require simultaneously believing having good engineers is critical.
The management decided to fleece the company for their own near-term benefit, to the detriment of shareholder value (which is now being represented in the stock price accordingly, and it'll get much worse, soon).
IBM Real(1) annual Revenue (in billions of 2016 dollars):
1986: 111
1996: 116
2006: 109
2016: 80
(1) adjusted by BLS CPI CalculatorProject homepage suggests this is an Intel project.
> Hyperscan is licensed under the BSD License.
> Copyright (c) 2015, Intel Corporation
I appreciate their perseverance if nothing else. If you look at the fate of companies like Nokia, IBM has some how managed to avoid this what has been meteoric shifts in their business.
Plus competition is always good.
Watson itself clearly was a great product and a big step in the development of AI. Just because the marketing department is making a mess of things shouldn't take away from the work that was done on Watson in the first place.