IBM Rebus
ibm.com
ibm.com
This t-shirt, the all-IBM I-shaped brutalist building I worked at, and the customer demo mainframe idly blinking in the lobby all evoked the mighty past of a company bled dry by its senior management. Even the company store selling branded knick-knacks, it somehow made me very proud to work at such a centenary company.
The company I left IBM for? Yeah, it's just another Fortune 10 soul-less corporation in a nondescript glass building. Not that IBM wasn't, but at least you could see the computing history on the walls.
Don't they usually give out like at least a free t-shirt and a mug for everyone?
Same thing with the startup I worked for, and the midsize/small company I work for now.
From my experience, this is not how it is outside the bubble of SV.
Not something you would willingly spend money on and this is definitely stuff companies give away for free. It seems to be changing a bit now with companies having an environmental committee for all stuff that is made in plastic.
- T-shirt, nice water bottle, backpack pins for interviewing (we got them on the swap over) - Hoodie and very nice ~$120 backpack on start - Hoodie at 2 years - Hoodie at holidays every year - T shirt & hoodie at every con I worked - Backpack at 2 years - Team hoodie, 3 t-shirts, or nort face soft shell every year with team logo on it - Yeti coffee cups for each team I founded - Custom yeezies
I have around 20 hoodies now, 3 backpacks, 30 shirts. This doesn't include the electronics we got every year. All of this stuff is american apparel (pre-issues) or nicer.
From megacorp I got a bad t-shirt and a paper thin targus backpack and the option to buy swag. When I rolled over to acquired startup we got a swag budget to bribe megacorp employees into meetings with us. It worked very well. We'd get Sr VPs in to a room with just a t-shirt for their kids.
Every single one had free coffee and snacks as well as free swag at least once or twice a year. Meaning shirts, sweatshirts, hats etc. Mostly lowish quality if I'm being fair, but my last company would give everybody really high quality stuff like 3-4 times a year.
Along with everything else they could think of too.
Free coffee for employees? Not from about 2 decades ago... ;)
Is this a joke that went over my head, or are they seriously making their employees pay for coffee?
Yep, it's as brain damaged an idea as it seems, and yep it's also an accurate depiction of how little they think of their employee productivity.
The money wasted on the employees dumping their own bins probably offsets the money saved on cleaning staff directly by an order of magnitude, not to mention the indirect losses of people being annoyed/pissed and leaving.
The team I was in had no money to expense so for the first few months I worked using just the company provided laptop with no peripherals, and had to wait for someone leaving to be able to grab their external monitor and a laptop stand. Team/Company morale was very low in my time there.
They finally made coffee free when the sales guys said it was too embarassing.
Just to make it clear, the $50 was the discounted price for the book that the employees had to PAY.
The gift was the discount. On the book. Of photos of $M++ art.
The cafeteria vendor drama was also a fun way to feel the bean counting penny-pinching machine at work.
The company store was there mostly to sell swag to give them to customers. I’ve expensed plenty of branded stuff, and well, that eye-bee-m t-shirt is classy. Every end of quarter or so they also had a sale that sold stuff below market rates, so it was a cheap way to get nice suitcases and backpacks.
also: remember there is ANOTHER ibm:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Brotherhood_of_M...
(younger at only 101 years old)
It’s strange to think of an organization whose essential imperative is “make money” as being something to consider in some sort of wider sociological, historical or even artistic context, but these places _were_ very important and some of them even harbor beauty.
I spent eight years at IBM and I too appreciated all the references to their storied history.
Someone took it away from me at my new job though.
Learning from that guy though was really eye opening. He had a fondness for the I guess 60's ish design. How do you make something that looks good on the side of a pen, and also looks good on the side of a plane? .5 cm to 5m maybe? familiar? recognizable?
This one is a cute puzzle. It doesn't do much for me, but I'd bet back in the day it was amazing to see a company as uptight and powerful as IBM doing something, I guess, whimsical. Yeah, that tape drive is full of dull grey boring tax records. But it's got a sense of humor about it.
Logo's are tricky.
A good design guideline book is a pretty amazing thing, and there's some of that in the do's and don'ts section. There's something comforting (to my disorganized programmer mind) about seeing the idea fully thought out, how it's supposed to be, and stuff to not do.
Former coworkers will probably recall that I was quite the stickler for the particular shade of red at a previous startup. I hope I didn't get on too many people's nerves :)
When it's all uniform and consistent it's magic. When it's mushy and weird, it's a lot less magic.
Rules about scaling logos and making them work in monochrome and color are constant though.
> A rebus (/ˈriːbəs/ REE-bəss) is a puzzle device that combines the use of illustrated pictures with individual letters to depict words or phrases. For example: the word "been" might be depicted by a rebus showing an illustrated bumblebee next to a plus sign (+) and the letter "n". It was a favourite form of heraldic expression used in the Middle Ages to denote surnames.
Half of them have the gall to ask that they be returned if the lady doesn't want to go home with them. Those cards aren't free, after all! And the default-yes "do nothing if you want to sleep with me" wording, my god!
I couldn’t understand what a mess IBM was. I was there for about 30 months.
During my time they removed tea bags and instant coffee from the “kitchen” at the office to cut costs.
They voluntold me to take a Lean Six Sigma course and I ended up working with a senior colleague on interviewing employees on what they spent their days doing so we could “help them be more efficient”.
My god I was so “green”.
Finally I saw the light and got the fuck out and joined a ln up and coming SaaS company and the difference was night and day.
Jack Donaghy : There they are, the Six Sigmas themselves!
Liz Lemon : They're dudes?
Jack Donaghy : Each of them embodies a pillar of the Six Sigma business philosophy: Teamwork, Insight, Brutality, Male Enhancement, Hand-Shakefulness, and Play Hard.
IBM’s 30, 20, and 10 year total return is 11%, 5%, and 2%.
SP500 is 10%, 9%, and 11.5%. And SP500 is much less risk than a single company, so the risk adjusted returns look even worse.
> Unrelated - what does IBM do nowadays?
Cloud, AI (Watson), and quantum computing.
There's also all the AI hype after Watson.
They don't have much hardware left outside of the Z-Machine mainframes which are pretty cool.
There's worthwhile research coming out of IBM once in a blue moon, but by and large, they seem to be chasing PR trends.
It's an incredibly beautiful book, not so for the corporate stuff, but for the elegance in Rand's designs. There's even a section in how all sorts of stationary is supposed to look.
They’re huge in IP as well
But rest assured the entire nuclear arsenal of democracy is currently probably running on an old ASM/400 sitting in the broom closet in some Air Force base somewhere.
https://www.ibm.com/design/language/ibm-logos/8-bar
because it goes into great detail of all the little things you have to change to make something like the 8-bar IBM logo look right when you invert it.
https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Rand-Steven-Heller/dp/0714839949...
And his own books on design are all worth a read.
He did the classic logos of IBM, NeXT, UPS, Morningstar, Cummins Engine, CBS, Westinghouse, and lots more.
Done by an intern in an afternoon? I'd understand that, but as a work of art...
Well, at least IBM is still around, in contrast to so many other tech companies that used to be very significant.
The side menu, even collapsed, overlays the content.
This is a website lauding IBM design, and yet ...
IBM succumbed to financial capitalism around 2000, maybe before (the usual mix of stock buybacks, reorganizations, senseless acquisitions, debt etc, etc, all accompanied by lavish management rewards), and has been been on a slow march to the grave ever since.
And this is where we are now, the website, about IBM's design prowess, is not designed to actually work.
So sad.
The point is, getting a website to render correctly across a range of browsers and their specific configurations is not too much of an ask (Well, it's not easy, but the vast majority of other sites manage it), and this one fails.