Lots, but very little of it faces the direct public and what little does isn't advertised as from IBM. The company is largely divided into a consulting, research, product development, and mainframes with that last one on its way out (though in all fairness it's been "on its way out" for 30+ years). As other commenters noted, a big portion of the consulting work is for governments because IBM is a trusted brand in the US and frankly is already large enough to have lots of salespeople to work on RFPs and developers who are already used to working slow. They also do a lot of B2B work though. The consulting work IBM does obviously varies per client but it's more modern than the sibling comment insinuates. Their strategy was focused on hybrid multicloud for a few years (the Redhat acquisition was a major part of this so they could push Openshift on customers) but very recently they're trying to make a hard shift to generative AI. IBM's research is even less public than their consulting projects but they love to advertise their work in quantum computing and I've heard they work on patents for chip manufacturing to sell to TSMC and others (don't quote me on this one, it's definitely not my area of expertise). Product development is responsible for maintaining all the proprietary IBM software that they promised to upkeep for god knows how long even though nobody in their right mind actually uses it anymore. At least that's my understanding. They probably do other more relevant things too. IBM does truthfully do interesting work, but they don't really sell to the public anymore so the public only knows them as "that big company that made computers in the 80s and somehow still exists." They also have a big multinational presence I've heard. Lots of expansion in India.

Check out his design manual for IBM. https://standardsmanual.com/products/ibm-graphic-design-guid...

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.

IBM seems to mainly grow by buying companies and milking support dollars, while keeping a skeleton crew for the product.

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.

Yeah, IBM's design is fantastic.

> Unrelated - what does IBM do nowadays?

Cloud, AI (Watson), and quantum computing.

They spend their time navigating the bureaucracy of DoD contracts. IBM is still around because they have contracts with the pentagon. Bidding upon these contracts is a route very rarely taken because it is the kind of process that takes years and knowledge that usually can only be recovered using a pentagram. As a result IBM will continue to exist as long as they continue to hold those Defense contracts that are 1. Extremely lucrative, 2. Long term and 3. Very difficult for anyone else to get involved in.

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.

Mainly offshore outsourcing.

Government contracting. Those Z series mainframes are pretty much ideal for tasks like running government payroll and pensions. Including in the face of the inevitable congressional brinksmanship.

They print money on hardware (Z), consulting, and red hat. They’re trying to grow in cloud and AI.

They’re huge in IP as well

Look wistfully back at its glory days?