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Comment by amdelamar | Hacker News Reader

They really are a sleeping giant. And they had half a million employees at one point. Now I think its more around 380k.

And yet no one really knows what they do. How many regular people have had their life improved in any way by IBM? Compare to Apple's strong stance on user privacy and easy-to-use technology, Google's wealth of free high quality services like Maps, Gmail, Youtube, and good affordable notebooks, and streaming companies like Netflix providing high-quality media content for much lower prices than cable, with little to no ads. IBM can't go bankrupt soon enough. They're a waste of engineering talent and have contributed nothing to the world.

Apple, Google, and Netflix are consumer-facing entities- most people in the western world are customers of at least one of these companies. IBM does not sell to consumers, so you generally don't hear about "life-improving" things from them, since they don't really need to advertise or compete that way.

Exactly. They're not consumer facing. But I do think that selling off ThinkPads hurts their image as their logo is no longer on devices. Last time I saw an IBM logo on a device was at T.J.Maxx on the cash register that looked very dated.

I don't buy that. All businesses should be consumer-facing in that they should improve life for all people, not just software engineers.

> How many regular people have had their life improved in any way by IBM?

Anyone who uses a PC.

> They're a waste of engineering talent and have contributed nothing to the world.

That's arguably true now...but to claim that IBM hasn't contributed anything to the world is just hyperbole. I mean, they invented the relational database and hard drive, and practically every modern computing concept is just a reimplementation of what existed on a mainframe.

You're really gonna put Netflix up against IBM on total impact on the world?

This Thanksgiving, ask the table what they think of Netflix and what they think of IBM. I'm interested to hear what the consensus is.

What your man in the street thinks about who has improved/affected their life and who actually has improved/affected their life are in most cases disjoint sets. Ask the man in the street who the most important computer innovators are and they'll say Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (who are/were business-men before anything else), you won't hear them mention John McCarthy or Dennis Ritchie (or likely even Alan Turing).

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