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Comment by RamshackleJ | Hacker News Reader

https://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM-2Q23-Earnings-Press... IBM is getting killed in infrastructure, their margins look to be growing but losing ~15% of their revenue y/y. This seems like them just gouging the last of the customers who are either unwilling or unable to leave.

for context during the same period AWS grew 12% y/y.

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I often wonder is AWS success due to paying top dollar to staff where as IBM seems to have gone down the cost cutting route and low salaries. I'm sure that isn't the only reason, but IBM's fall from the top has been pretty drastic over the last 30 years.

I guess it also could just be due to companies eventually get too big and bloated which causes them to innovate slower.

>I often wonder is AWS success due to paying top dollar to staff where as IBM seems to have gone down the cost cutting route and low salaries.

I think that's almost certain. Even if IBM finds and rewards the rockstars they have and promotes them quickly and gives them special treatment, i'm guessing a lot of them would prefer to work at Amazon or Google. Not only would they make good money, most of their coworkers would be of higher quality as well.

I bet IBM beats AWS handily on work-life balance, pressure from management, and most of the metrics of work satisfaction other than compensation and maybe office facilities

IBM probably doesn’t use Chime for meetings, either.

I always assumed a good chunk of developers derive satisfaction from either making software that is useful and used, or compensation. I don't see how IBM wins on either of those fronts.

I suppose for a narrow group of people might prefer IBM, but certainly not the majority of talent.

If every dollar of IBM's $617M/Q loss of infrastructure revenue went to AWS, that would only be around 27% of AWS's growth.

AWS also increased their prices by a similar amount.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/aws-and-azure-cloud...

AWS is also charging a premium for the DDR5 hardware they just launched. The m6 family was the same price as the m5 equivalents. The m7 series is 5% more expensive on Intel, and while the AMD machines used to be 10% cheaper than Intel, they’re now 20% more expensive.

> This seems like them just gouging the last of the customers who are either unwilling or unable to leave.

This course of action is not surprising looking at their net income and profit margin trends:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/net-income

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/profit-mar...

infrastructure includes a lot more than cloud in IBM

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