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Comment by freddy418_sc | Hacker News Reader

It looks to me like, in general, the bigger a company gets, the more the "leadership" starts acting like they are running a hedge fund. The money becomes more important than the product. Then when the product is de-emphasized, the employees obviously lose their importance and then the "leadership" start treating them like cattle to be moved from grazing location to grazing location. I put "leadership" in quotes because they somehow tend to be managers, who never actually built anything, who are clueless about the nuances of the product.

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IBM has been dead since the 90's. Back when Lou Gerstner supposedly "saved" IBM from death he actually didn't, back then Real IBM the thing we think of as IBM actually died, and instead Zombie IBM took it's place (zIBM). zIBM is run as you say, like a hedge fund. Making products is incidental to zIBM and it doesn't care what it makes as long as somebody will pay (so it doesn't care if it's products are good or even usable). zIBM also implemented this infamous stack ranking system, the executives are terrible, and there are so many layers between management and action on the ground that the left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing.

Management is so insulated from whats actually happening by all these layers nobody can effectively steer the organization, there are so many divisions and people that nobody can really track what is happening. The only thing that zIBM is actually really good at is managing its share price, and crafting it's artisinal financial statements so that nobody actually has any idea how bad it's doing. But we all know that zIBM revenue is declining for almost 10 years, so it's going to be a long slow crawl to zIBMs true final fiscal death.

I agree. Meanwhile, the IBM stock is up 1,320% since 1993. At one point it was nearly 2,000%.

That's the problem with playing the stock market: you've not only got to be right, you've got to be right at the exact right time or you'll get slaughtered.

IBM are really masters at managing their share price, with buybacks and strategic announcements (like Watson), ultimately they still only make mainframes and support legacy products mostly. Nobody really uses their second-rate cloud. So mainframes/services and dragging out government contracts are really where it's at for them.

I fired IBM from my life "for cause" a few years ago after 32 years at Research.

This comment is overall correct, though there were some isolated pockets of truly amazing/wonderful (some classified) things to enjoy working on since the mid-2010s.

>>Real IBM the thing we think of as IBM actually died, and instead Zombie IBM took it's place (zIBM).

That would be true for any company once their core set of products go out of trend without replacements.

Lets say tomorrow Google/Alphabet loses its search engine business, there is nothing much they can do but financially engineer the company in a way that is useful to share holders, which might include going into businesses many Google people now consider beneath their station.

IBM that way is an incredibly well run company.

>That would be true for any company once their core set of products go out of trend without replacements.

Why would any company allow it's products and services to age out of the market? How would any other company survive such a thing?

If Google "loses" in the search engine space, it loses everything. Everything Google is and does, is financed by ad revenue from search. Without search, Google becomes a pauper.

To take this in the IBM direction: Assume they (GOOG) lose at search, all the devs abandon ship or are layed off, Google could still get business because it could coast on the street-cred it built back when it was successful. So as long as it has mind-share and the google brand does not get destroyed it could still persist on well after death, draining down it's resources and selling off subdivisions (essentially cannibalizing itself, much as IBM has done). Google could aggressively manage it's stock price to hide it's status from the plebs and milk government contracts (that other organizations can't even bid on) and cannibalizing itself and drawing down it's savings for many years. This is the story of IBM. Once the boomer generation is no longer in charge of anything then IBM will fully die, because they don't make anything or do anything that the average person cares about, so they're mindshare dies with the boomer generation.

When companies get large enough, they need to show that they are outperforming the market at large for their shareholders. If the company is only making a 1% return on its product, why not take that money and put it in the stock market instead of employee salaries and asset acquisition? Even startups deal with this issue - why should a VC fund take an enormous risk on your company when they can put it in the stock market and earn middling return that's still much better than a complete loss?

The main difference is that as a startup, you the CEO know everybody in your startup, you know your sole customers, you know the product intimately. This allows you to focus on the product and "secret sauce" that differentiates your company as an investment from the rest of the market. But when you're a CEO of a large public company, you have too many employees to count, too many products to count, and too many customers to count. Financial instruments become a necessary abstraction to help deal with all that complexity.

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