From the comments:
> These guys were important once, right? I don't think I'm old enough to remember such a time. I thought they were a law firm for a while because they only seemed to be mentioned in court cases.
Ouch.
> These guys were important once, right? I don't think I'm old enough to remember such a time. I thought they were a law firm for a while because they only seemed to be mentioned in court cases.
Ouch.
According to their Q4-FY2020 earnings report, they did $2.5bn in revenue from their systems segment last year (which includes IBM Z, Power, and OS's). But their most important segments are Global Technology Services ($6.6bn revenue) and "Cloud & Cognitive Software Segment" ($6.8bn revenue). GTS is cloud infrastructure + support, while C&CSS includes "Cloud & Data Platforms", "Cognitive Applications", and transactions processing platforms...
I'm not sure what exposure the commenter has had to IBM, but it's a bit of a culture shock to hear someone saying they're not important.
The Red Hat acquisition and spin out of the services garbage might make them more relevant again.
The downside (to IBM) was that Wall Street decided "never again" and fought hard to prevent another company of IBM's scale from reappearing.
Yes, that is such a complete misunderstanding on what IBM does that it hurts. IBM is a huge corporation close to be 100 years old that still is one one of the most innovatives in the world.
"In 2020, IBM topped the list of patent recipients for the 28th consecutive year with 9,130 patents, while Samsung Electronics Co. was second with 6,415. IBM received the most patents in three of the 10 fastest growing fields in technology -- quantum computers, machine learning and computer systems using neural networks that imitate how the human brain works, according to a recent study by Fairview Research’s IFI Claims Patent Services." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-12/ibm-s-pat...
Google Gross revenue: $161.85 billion. IBM Gross revenue: $73.62 billion. Twitter revenue: $3.72 billion
IBM does not dominate the cultural landscape like Google or Facebook do. But, it is a robust company that has stand the test of time.
It would be like laughing at Akamai or Incapsula because nobody talks about them on the general media.
IBM literally optimizes for the patent filing metric (and others generally do not), and that metric is not at all correlated to "innovation".
Most people would also likely argue that data would not support your claim about robustness either.
The graph of IBM's revenue over the past few decades does not tell a happy story: https://www.statista.com/statistics/265003/ibms-revenue-sinc...
It doesn't get better if you go further back. IBM has the same revenue now that it did in 1996.
Robust usually means strong and vigorous. I think it would be a challenge to find someone who believes the past decade at IBM has been that, particularly the Rometty era (IE 22 consecutive quarters of revenue decline)