Consulting is less than a third of their revenue and regardless of how you feel about consulting, it seems kind of idiotic to claim that this "barely makes sense at all at this point". Are the only companies that make sense the ones that work on fad bullshit that makes the front page of HN?
The hot new thing at IBM was "global services" consulting. Since I left they've sold their chip business, laptop business and really doubled down on consulting..
Did you get to work with Edgar Codd or do you know someone who might know someone who worked with him?
That said, I've hated the handful of IBM software products I've needed to use.
Another anecdote: I've never met a fellow developer that spoke highly of IBM. That includes the folks who used to work there.
I think it's remarkable how rare it is to meet someone that speaks highly of the company. Companies don't usually achieve such reputation without reason.
Worked with a buncha folks in the NC Research Triangle area, all former IBM. None had good things to say about the engineering culture there. Most did long stays regardless -- it's that kinda of org -- talking like 10+ years, but jumped to other companies like Red Hat (ha!), Clorox, Splunk, and Uni research after the last big shakeup.
A better model was that Rometty was not good at choosing what to fund and which bets to make. kinda a failed VC fund.
Lookup the saga of HP's memristor followed by "The Machine" for a similar story.
Then I guess we can throw out Xerox Parc's NLS because they never commercialized "windows, hypertext, graphics, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor." They were commercialized by others later on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
We can also throw out most psych, social science, archeology, and history R&D, too.
And the laser, which took a few decades to find an application.
Fun fact: funded by ARPA
Archeology / history, on the other hand, definitely have some pretty awesome finds.
Yes.
It attracts playful wizards. If you get enough of those no amount of zombies can beat them.
They could have built it over time to offer real assistance to knowledge workers with a real revenue stream.
But that would have required vision and foresight.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/technology/what-happened-...
However everyone is still pretty far off from that.
> regardless of how you feel about consulting
It's a matter of how well they do it. They're not known for creating customer value.
> Are the only companies that make sense the ones
... who don't lay off entire arenas full of people and discuss stupid platitudes like replacing them with AI.
Pretty much. Management's messaging around this was so delusional - "replace with AI" - that it's obviously a stock play from a company desperate to cut losses, not a positive statement from a going concern.