Hacker News Reader

Comment by pslam | Hacker News Reader

Businesses this big and old don't "sink" unless there is utter contempt for obvious changes in market conditions by the entire board, for a sustained amount of time. Even with utter contempt, it would take an enormous amount of time for them to implode. IBM isn't that stupid and they obviously understand something isn't working.

They're also roughly 100 years old (depending on definitions). They're reinvented and reshaped their business many times. "Two new broom handles, two new brushes" but it's still the same company, as they say. I'm afraid I find it ludicrous that IBM would actually end up in anything resembling financial failure.

View on HN

> They're also roughly 100 years old (depending on definitions). They're reinvented and reshaped their business many times. "Two new broom handles, two new brushes" but it's still the same company, as they say. I'm afraid I find it ludicrous that IBM would actually end up in anything resembling financial failure.

People were saying the same thing of Sears 10 years ago...

Sears falls into the "utter contempt" category, along with utter incompetence. It was obvious to every outside observer their model was busted. It was obvious how bad their stores were to anyone who went there to try to buy something. There was nothing sudden about it, really. I think many could see this happening more than 10 years ago.

Also, unlike IBM, Sears has very little of worth which would uniquely identify it as "Sears" after asset sale. It's all fungible land, rent, concrete store walls, and staff. They have many competitors with practically identical overlap in business. IBM is not like at all like this.

> It was obvious to every outside observer their model was busted.

Well, imagine I am somebody at the target market of IBM (whatever that is), why would I want to hire them?

IBM's customers are the same as Microsoft's customers (at least the high profit ones). Very large enterprise companies locked into contracts worth millions and 100s of millions of dollars. They move slow like icebergs and carry as much weight.

They don't worry about new customers when the largest companies in the world have gone through months or years to get them as preferred tier one vendors.

Sears on the other hand did not serve large Enterprises and were generating revenue mostly from retail. Consumer vs. Enterprise is like Apples and Oranges guys.

Hum... I work in a large MS customer. We are a happy customer for some measure. We are also an Oracle customer, and happier than I would expected to be possible if I didn't know about there.

I just can't imagine anything we could hire from IBM.

It's all fungible land, rent, concrete store walls, and staff. They have many competitors with practically identical overlap in business. IBM is not like at all like this.

Ermm yes it is. What do they do that HPE, DXC, Accenture, Crapita, Fujitsu, TCS, Infosys, Wipro yadda yadda don’t? All IBM had left is the rapidly tarnishing prestige of their once mighty brand.

So you're saying IBM is more like Kodak?

Kodak like Sears made money on retail consumers. IBM like Microsoft make a majority of revenue on Enterprise customers and service contracts.

Have you heard of EDS? How about HP global? They were selling to enterprises and still became obsolete..

I’m not sure that’s true. In the days of film the average consumer shot <1 roll per year. Whereas a professional photographer would shoot a dozen or more rolls per day. Their biggest customers would have been newspapers and studios buying 10,000 rolls at a time on a regular basis

No, they weren't. They were in a pretty much constant decline since the mid-70s, with shit really hitting the fan in the 90s and early 2000s.

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/28/business/big-change-is-ex...

The question is not if they will become a Lehman, it's if they will become a GE

Reply on news.ycombinator.com