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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

I am just curious.. I havent purchased a single IBM roduct for maybe more than a decade (professionally and personally) -- the last major professional purchase was an AS/400 upgrade... 1998?

I have never bought an IBM-->lenovo laptop, although I have been provisioned some in various jobs...

What other main product(s) does IBM have that I would want?

they have great eng resources, scientists, etc... but I just dont see any of my money headed their way any time soon...

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IBM is a massive consulting agency and they sell people's time and expertise to other companies. Customer projects, resource augmentation. Similar to Accenture and others.

The problem is that you will fall behind if you cannot transform your research into real products. Just like the smart planet idea, this idea is very brilliant and it was proposed around a decade ago, however the business around is a failure because of execution failure. Nowadays we are seeing other companies working on smart planet while IBM is changing to cognitive. What can we expect from cognitive?

Some personal thought, execution is key for business success now.

IBM SPSS is a product maybe not sure for you but IBM pushes a lot among Data Analytics Practitioners. They had their legacy in Market research companies. But democratisation of R and Python ate up a lot of market share from Sas and SPSS. Nevertheless still a lot of companies who used SPSS are still using it. It's an irony that IBM failed to capitalise the hype of Data science.

As a consumer, probably nothing.

But they still sell a lot of big iron to banks and FIs and try to shove QRadar down everyone's throat.

Those irons are only a small portion of IBM revenue now due to cloud. But they haven't put the correct resource on cloud and software. It was working in the past even though its software is very difficult to use. But now it's the other way around.

They haven't done consumer stuff for ages.

These days, IBM's competitors are companies like Deloitte, not Dell.

I have seen them pushing their vendor lock-in oriented BlueMix PAAS offering. More for dev than prod.

Maybe DB/2 and Websphere liberty profile...

They tack the name 'Watson' on a lot of stuff, but some of that might be good.

Have you tried to use DB2 or WebSphere? Do you feel painful when you install them?

Liberty profile isn't exactly painful, but everything else Websphere is.

Regarding DB/2, I don't think that the installation process is the most interesting property of a database. The database is about as good as you can get, but there are certainly other options.

I tried installing WebSphere portal ten years ago for some reason and that killed my laptop. I'd say that that's probably the best possible outcome...

Oh, and I think TAM/TFIM/ISAM might be ok for companies over a certain size.

Not sure about their cloud offerings. Probably not promising.

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