Comment by rexreed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rexreed | Hacker News Reader

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IBM has stalled because it stopped innovating, and instead pushing highly cumbersome, expensive, consulting-centric "products" that are nothing more than expensive services tied to proprietary technologies. Where IBM isn't proprietary, it rests heavily on open source offerings that it has acquired (RedHat). Ironically, it's IBM itself that is every much the sclerotic "dinobaby" that it seems to dislike. Simply hiring in a younger pool won't change that dynamic. If anything, that approach is deeply cynical, and only makes sense when you realize that IBM sees its growth in services and "solutions" offerings that depend on large numbers of lesser-paid, non-family bound "early professional hires" that they seem to desire.

IBM placed bets on highly speculative "moonshot" programs like IBM Watson (especially Watson Health) that failed, while simultaneously failing to effectively compete in the growing cloud-centric market. IBM could have been a realistic contender in the Enterprise against AWS, Google, and Microsoft cloud environments, but it instead opted for large-scale vendor lock-in style approaches.

I think you two are looking at two sides of the same coin.

IBM has stalled due to poor business decisions. But those decisions are a symptom of bureaucratic system of IBM and those who know how to navigate it.

You can't divorce the actions of a company from the people who constitute the company.

It's true you can't disconnect the decisions of the business from the ones making those decisions. But you also can't hire your way out of current problems, especially hiring lower in the organization and hope for change. To completely reboot a company's decision-making culture by way of importing new people without a complete reboot of leadership is very difficult. And even if you could completely replace everyone in the organization from the very top to the very bottom (which is an impossibility), you're still left with the legacy of existing customers and technology as well as your brand and reputation and relationships. Simply put, changing people is not a solution to these problems. People and decision-making relate to each other, but as time goes on, the ability for one to impact the other without regard to the existing impedance in the organization and market is limited. This is part of the Innovator's Dilemma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma)

They could flip the relationship with Red Hat and let them run the show

Totally agree. You have to replace the old school decision makers embedded throughout the company to have any hope of changing culture and direction.

Yes exactly. The symptoms are mainly causes by the posse of old timers in the leadership, which BTW remains after Whitehurst, the only hope of change, left. This was one of the motivators of me leaving as well, as I didn't see any chance of real change in the company.

Current employee here. They have identified and are focused on changing this. IBM is moving towards technology provider role (from consulting focus). This is also reflected by the new CEO who comes from research background and was the main person pushing towards buying of Redhat.

The forces of resistance to change and the pro-services culture at IBM are strong. Very strong. See how far the desire and will to change goes when placed up against the marketing and sales culture at IBM and pressures from the market.

> The forces of resistance to change and the pro-services culture at IBM are strong. Very strong.

Well yea, most of their headcount is consultants now, right? Corporate America might not be a democracy but neither can executives change the culture by edict.

Orly? Satya Nadella ended the Windows/Office duopoly at Microsoft. A lot (most?) of the OG senior leadership left.

No more proprietary OS lock-ins; Windows even can run Linux in a subsystem now (WSL). VSCode is open source.

I’d say he’s been fairly successful in changing the corporate culture.

Time will tell if Azure is any worse or better than the other cloud providers wrt lock-in.

yeah - we were accquired as part of their 'cloud services' shopping spree... so far, it seems like they're TRYING to drive off the very people they acqui-hired. Contracts seem more like a Tata level staff aug. then a 'professional services' play.

I'd be very excited to see any such change come to pass, as an employee of a significantly larger, older, and even more bureaucratic organization.

The US Government?

That's the one.

Or AT&T.

IBM Cloud is pretty good to be honest, you're going too far with your dismissive analysis. Many IBM Cloud offerings are fast and reliable and come with great support in most cases...

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