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Comment by DCKing | Hacker News Reader

Ah this seems to be new, thanks! That's exactly the kind of response I hoped I would get.

Unfortunately completing this flow - with the goal to get a temporary shell on a Power system running some Linux distro - requires me to authorize a payment of over 1300 dollars before I even select an image. That's for "reserving" 1 POWER core and 2GB of RAM... As an individual developer playing with this, that's way over my head. I'd understand very high end cloud pricing for that (tens of dollars per hour, I'd be happy to pay that for messing around a little), but this isn't even a cloud machine pricing model. For reference, $1300 is over half the price of getting a Talos motherboard with an 8-core POWER9 CPU you then actually own.

It seems IBM does not have the infrastructure or volume to permit cloud pricing here. I understand they might not have this, but in my opinion they need to work on this to make it accessible.

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Completely agree. I've talked many times to some of the folks there and it seems to me the product is not for a developer or hobbyist, which is unfortunate. It is purely enterprise. Thought this will open up a parallel ecosystem for certain applications but IBM does not seem to think that.

I just don't understand how IBM - being acutely aware of what happened to Itanium and SPARC + running a cloud platform themselves - still believes this notion of "enterprise hardware" is the way of the future. Surely IBM was/is even better entrenched in this area than HP and Sun/Oracle/Fujitsu, but come on. POWER has a lot of history in consumer accessible products even. This is just a recipe for fading into irrelevance ever more.

Sounds like a problem that should be easy to find on an org chart.

If you don’t reward good ideas (they don’t even need to be particularly good or novel, just common sense), you’ll have a company trying to grow something that’s reached its peak usage with motivational speeches, very inspiring leaders and good old pressure on employees as a form of local optimization.

It’s extremely easy to find. The problem is the org chart itself. The entire way they run this stuff is not setup to handle the kinds of things we expect (and get) from every other hardware vendor or cloud provider that could reasonably be considered a competitor to them in either category.

Mostly, but I think you could have an org chart and let individuals and teams override it if they find good ways to reuse assets.

I just don't think most companies run this way, maybe it's the military way of thinking of strict hierarchy rather than a market where the best ideas can develop or where you can at least break out of the hierarchy to get something started.

The MBAs and bean counters would probably argue that it's important to get certain unpopular things done, but I think a market would solve that too, as soon as something becomes a bottle neck, someone would step in.

My impression is that organizations are far too centered around VPs and directors who get to carry on without having to prove themselves again in the new situations they're in.

Beats me. Can't believe a company that was making processors for the most picky of all industries (gaming consoles) is now completely ignoring the everyday consumer. Org priorities and financial engineering it looks like.

They've made huge changes since those days, getting rid first of x86 laptops and desktops then servers then chip fab. None of those decisions ever seemed particularly wise to me, especially the last.

The most frustrating part is they made really good products(even if slightly expensive) but somehow didn't follow through on any of them.

What makes you think that IBM sales people and management cares about "the way of the future"?

They care about the quarterly report and right now the best way to improve short-term performance is to milk your existing locked-in customers for as much money as possible.

Because they've just announced the next entry into a series of processors that by all accounts can take the fight to Intel and AMD's best (and has done so for some time), which requires huge investments and long term planning, roadmaps and funding commitments to work. Seems pretty committed to long term thinking to me.

At a guess you are not the target audience and this up front commitment is their way of filtering you out.

Of course I'm not. My entire point is that filtering out average Janes like me is antithetical to the long-term interests of POWER, and extremely weird for a cloud platform that allows you to spin up an amd64 VM in a few seconds for a few cents. You're left with an audience that has to use POWER (either because legacy or their purchasing colleagues thought it somehow was a good idea), not an audience that actually wants to.

It speaks volumes to me and says that IBM knows perfectly well that they are not interested in cost conscious customers but only want those for whom the IT department is a cost center and not a core strategic asset.

That's why you'll never see a Netflix or a Whatsapp on IBM infra. But banks, insurance companies, medical companies etc are still large contributors to IBMs revenue streams. If your idea of software development is agile teams and capable programmers churning out code to power your business then you're not an IBM customer or even a prospect.

If your idea of software is 5000 programmers as interchangeable cogs in a machine with an annual release and three month acceptance cycles then IBM is where you'll probably end up.

I understand that is how IBM thinks. I just don't like that they only think this way, as it feels like spoilt potential. IBM has all the pieces in place - they have great technology with high performance, ppc64le actually has pretty good apparent support from mainstream Linux distros, infrastructure and languages (for a non x86/arm architecture), and they have full "creative liberty" of where they focus their platform. It would be an awesome option to have for cloud infrastructure, but they keep it all to themselves.

They could be using that to do what AWS does with Graviton2 - cost control their completely integrated stack and make it a competitive advantage. Sell more performance per dollar despite having a non-amd64 architecture. Use it to give everyone more choice and competition. But instead they mostly use it to lock in their old (or new?) enterprise customers. The irony is that these two models could easily coexist, but they don't seem to understand the former and understand the latter very well.

And I can't help but think the latter is a losing model, as my strong impression is that the movement in the enterprise is away from "enterprise hardware", and towards commodity hardware. IBM needs to work on becoming commodity, in my opinion.

Oh, you are totally right, it is spoiled potential. But they've been doing this for so long it is impossible for them to change. Hence the very long and slow slide to the bottom. I'd see the Maffia change their tune before IBM ever will, way too much institutional inertia.

I know some of the IBM story from very close and it takes a certain attitude to even want to work there.

What's funny about this is that it used be be true - Whatsapp started on Softlayer, and didn't move away until Facebook bought them.

If IBM had even just kept pace and stayed behind AWS with Softlayer after they acquired them, they would have a healthy cloud business by now. It might be because I maintained a system on Softlayer both pre and post acquisition - so I was really close and able to see what was happening - but they squandered a huge opportunity there.

Ah yes, that's true, they in fact were hosted there at some point. I couldn't have picked a worse example :) Or; in a way it is proof that IBM is a bad choice for companies that operate at scale and are low margin and data heavy. Hosting costs must have been a substantial fraction of operating costs for Whatsapp (obviously, long after personnel).

To be fair, POWER is an open standard, and there's absolutely nothing stopping someone like Linode, DigitalOcean, or Hetzner from offering POWER-based systems at a smaller hourly price.

edit: oh hey, you're ahead of me :D https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24185759

> To be fair, POWER is an open standard, and there's absolutely nothing stopping someone like Linode, DigitalOcean, or Hetzner from offering POWER-based systems at a smaller hourly price.

Well besides the fact that 1) IBM is the only party with both the capabilities and interest in making high performance Power based products [1], and 2) evidently does not understand how to (or why to) invest in bringing this to a general audience. I don't really care if they would do this in IBM Cloud or with other cloud infrastructure companies, but they don't seem to be doing either. In addition 3) why would other parties be interested in running Power when they can run amd64 or arm? It certainly doesn't look to have a price advantage...

IBM really needs to shepherd Power well - they're the only ones that can do it. But I can't help but thinking they seem to be leading it to the grave despite apparently very capable engineering.

[1]: And why would anyone but IBM go for Power at this point if they can have ARM too? An open license matters very little when compared to ARM's mindshare and momentum.

As it is, POWER is on a slow decline towards irrelevance by focusing only on milking their existing enterprise customers as long as it lasts.

Which is a huge shame, the POWER ISA per se is mostly fine, and their commitment to open firmware etc. for trustworthy computing (see Raptor) is a niche that for some reason interests nobody else.

If they want to turn it around and compete with x86, ARM and maybe even RISC-V on the low end, they need to commit to openpower. Get some interesting cores open sourced under the openpower umbrella, docs, open source bus interfaces for connecting stuff on a SOC, etc. And get some decent priced hardware into the hands of hobbyists and as dev boards for embedded.

If any management/exec thought of this filter, they are idiots. I'd imagine if they made these as accessible as x86 servers to me - a humble sysadmin, and I could prove by data that our legacy Fortran scientific application can run faster on it than the newest Intel servers (it most likely would, given SMT differences, higher memory bandwidth, wider cache lines, more efficient 7 nm process, higher clocks etc) I'd recommend to my boss to spend our annual compute budget on these boxes instead of the Intel servers because that one legacy application consumes a lot of our HPC compute capacity. My boss and I would happily pay IBM to give this critical application a boost. Too bad, IBM filtered me away.

Agreed. Lots of companies have this 'call our sales department' strategy prior to giving you any information at all. That's always been a great way to lose my business, and indirectly the businesses for which we consult. But that's perfectly ok with me. If a company is not willing to list their prices up front then that's a good indication that they are not competitive.

Besides that, some of the atrocities that I've seen IBM and their partners commit are a good warning that you want to stay far away from them. Lest you be Watsonized and made dependent on marketing-masquerading-as-technology.

The last time I checked (which was quite a while ago) you could configure and price at least some categories of POWER servers on IBM's website much like you can with Dell or any other x86 vendor. The big difference though was in the amount of sticker shock when you see the bottom line price.

Very much agree. When IBM acquired Red Hat I really hoped they were going to get serious about cloud. They still might, but at least for now me as an individual guy just can't play with their hardware. I admit I'm quite impatient and I get irritated when any amount of red tape blocks efficient allocation of my time, but I don't think (given how easy it is on other cloud platforms) it's too much to ask for if you want to be taken seriously as a public cloud offering.

There are other options (1 is offline being upgraded this week)

https://developer.ibm.com/linuxonpower/cloud-resources/

Each of these do some filtering because they give out resources only to find people bitcoin mining. Also, a good number of experimenters give up on the first obstacle they encounter or aren't really well-versed in benchmarking / architectural differences (lots of folks running microbenchmarks). There are some incredible resources available (many free) for those looking for a partner and not just a box. Good luck in finding the right partner for your projects.

How would filtering out potential developers benefit a platform’s viability? My imagination isn’t sufficient to envision a market situation where this could ever make sense. Can anyone here describe a hypothetical scenario where as a company pushing a platform you want less developers interested in it?

It could be your going about it a bit wrong. IBM does have trial POWER cloud instances. Or at least they did a couple years ago, as I managed to get my hands on one through the IBM developer program.

OTOH, getting into the developer program requires talking to their sales/marketing droids too. But, if your a software OEM or have a SAS product, they were (are?) hungry and actively doing their best to recruit companies to their platforms. So, you spend a couple hours answering their questions, and in return you get some pretty steep hardware/software discounts and they will loan you machines.

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