The Rise and Fall of the 'IBM Way'
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
IBM's approach was indeed heavy-weight, and they loved complexifying things—but so did a lot of their customers in finance, aerospace, automotive, consumer goods, yadda yadda. IT operated by an entirely different business model and set of preferences in 1960–1990 than it did in 2000. It was the bespoke, pre-open standards, we'll handle all the edge cases in this lovingly homegrown solution era. The products were expensive, but in many cases solved technical operational problems that nothing else did. "Best of breed" was a common rallying cry; interchangeable parts and the virtues of utter standardization only came into prominence slowly.
The world's very different now, and there was enormous tension inside IBM, and between IBM and its customers and competitors, evolving to where we are today. (The same was true of almost all the legacy competitors.) However real that tension, what worked in the Before Times was the cause, not that IBM only employed doofuses or brought Mongol Hordes and crappy technology to bear.
But it felt like IBM Research was totally disconnected from the actual business of IBM. The switch away from pensions also seemed to make IBM way less attractive for new hires.
To have the second largest super computer down the hall, an electron tunneling microscope, and beauty of the Hudson Valley seems like a bygone era. The innovation, patents, and persona were not enough to move the needle vs Silicon Valley.
Total comp is what matters. A meager DB pension is worth less than RSUs from a competing tech company earning tons more profit.
I vastly prefer 401k and mega backdoor Roth capabilities than any DB pension. But IBM’s problem was not just getting rid of DB pensions, it was not paying competitive total comp in the first place. And also not having offices where their target employees would want to work.
(hope this doesn't come off as condescending, I'm including these extra details for any non native English speakers because it's kind of a slang word)
IBM problem today is:
1) The bureaucracy and general organizational sluggishness created by years and years of policy over policy to avoid 1%, 2% risks that in the end impact 100% of the company.
2) the leadership, which mostly come from the commercial part of the firm and are "number cookers", who now how to play the forementioned bureaucracy and controls, moving around air to look like their are beating their targets.
This makes the company extremely slow, unwilling to take risks, letting Google and Microsoft pass them repeatedly. Personal Computers, the Internet, Cloud Computing and now AI. IBM was at the right place on all of those opportunities, but its internal problems made it unable to take the right action to fetch them.
They were directly competing with the future of tech, in particular as it applied to personal use.
However, what IBM forgot is that the market is big, and the market drives towards commoditization wherever it can. Any technical advancement that makes technology faster/cheaper is where the market will go -- even if it means compromising in other areas like up-time. IBM is, naturally, allergic to becoming a commodity and tries to drive to higher margin business. e.g. Mainframes, consultant heavy engagements, AI, etc.
But the revolution that happened since the PC revolution, that commodity hardware and open source software (free in beer and freedom) could power companies both the size of IBM and in the same competitive space seems to be a lesson IBM has perpetually never quite gotten into their DNA. There's no "fixing" IBM. It will linger on momentum for a while until somebody else eventually just buys it for whatever IP they can squeeze out of it, dismembers the corpse, and spins out single purpose core businesses all in one excrement pile. It might take another decade or so, but it's coming.
I don't think there is a 2nd law of thermodynamics for social and economic processes, and I think that it is provably the case that specific decisions were made by specific people that allowed all of the things you described to happen, and that there are easily conceivable alternative paths we might have taken.
In some sense, IBM is idealistic in the true sense of the word. That ideology is certainly not HackerNews' ideology, but it is more complicated than the simple "capitalist company doing capitalist things" explanation.
To wit, I just watched a long form video [1] on the passion that goes into IBM mainframes including some interesting clips of various physical robustness tests of the assembled systems. It reminded me of watching clips from various space programs where a largely full-up untested rocket had to put humans into orbit without blowing up.
Another revolution that's occurred, but IBM chose not to really follow (asterisk) is the idea that you assume some percentage of your hardware will fail (instead of trying to make it never die) -- then you engineer around that. I'm not sure what will win in the end, but right now the entire industry is telling us to have failover into different availability zones in Amazon, or even across clouds -- one of which IBM offers.
1 - https://youtu.be/ouAG4vXFORc (asterisk) - IBM does sort of have an understanding of this of course, they have a cloud after all.
This plays out at the small scale as well. When I started out writing commercial software it was very common to either sell a PC with it, or at least sell the concept of computerisation. For lots of companies this was their first computer. We were their defects IT department.
10 years goes past, and customers now already have computers. 10 more years and they have IT either on staff, or on contract.
We got to go back to writing software.
In the same way, yes, IBM needed to do everything. There was no off-the-shelf anything. So try make hardware, wrote software, sold services.
And this is the point. IBM always existed to sell services. Everything else was to get them there. Other people made hardware. Others made software. They are left to focus on their services.
This is likely revisionist history because I'm sure along the way lots of IBMers saw themselves as a hardware or software company. But I'm not sure that was ever the "core" idea. Those were just necessary to sell services, and were off-loaded along the way.
This is called vertical integration. It's not about "new" though it does crop up there. Amazon is an example of this: Chips for servers, warehouses, ships, vans for last mile... YKK zippers is another, they make their own equipment, refine raw materials all in an effort to have the best final product (and it shows).
> And this is the point. IBM always existed to sell services. Everything else was to get them there.
So the bit where IBM sold typewriters and time clocks in 1911 was all a big plot to sell software services someday?
> 10 years goes past, and customers now already have computers. 10 more years and they have IT either on staff, or on contract.
The failure of IBM is long, slow and tragic. It is a failure to evolve with the market, it is the gutting and miss management of core assets.
"Failure of IBM"?
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/market-cap
They had a long legacy of mechanical engineering from the days of card punches and readers and teleprinters. Even into the 70s and 80s they were a major — perhaps by then the major — typewriter manufacturer. Typewriters were “business machines”.
IBM’s original name was The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. They started out making cash registers and related products.
Maybe a better way to see this is that during WWII they reconfigured their factories to make machine guns. Factories don’t look like that any more.
https://www.wired.com/2009/10/the-original-ibm-thinkpad-was-...
Before there even were computers, they gave out these small paper pads for jotting things down, with "THINK" on the cover.
Here is how IBM worked when their approach worked well: They would have polished sales representatives (reps) who would get the confidence of a relatively high decision maker, commonly a CEO, also with contacts with the BOD, in an organization that had some serious data processing problems. The IBM rep would talk with the CEO (decision maker) about the problems and claim that IBM could implement a good solution. Commonly that was music to the ears of the CEO -- just give the leadership, design work, technical work and products of the solution to IBM.
Generally we would regard IBM's charges as high, but in the target companies (1) IBM didn't have serious competition and (2) the company and their problem was so big that the IBM charges were worth it.
With the business at a target customer, IBM worked hard, made sure the hard/software was highly reliable, and delivered good results.
E.g., one customer was a medical insurance company. They had staffs in three time zones keying in medical claims applications. For this they had a mainframe computer, with their usual operating system, their network equipment ending with their 3270 terminals, COBOL-based (right, maybe PL/I, etc.) applications software, DB2 relational data base, etc.
The system worked very well: A significant outage meant that to keep up with the work staff would have to be called back after hours and paid overtime.
Soooo, it was important that the whole system had almost no downtime. Part of the approach was to have a test system and for any hard/software update, run it on the test system for some days before using the update for the real work.
Both IBM and the customer were very serious. Uh, having to pay some overtime could cost the System Manager his bonus.
Now, there are lots of options for data entry. PCs and even laptops can play a major role. The mainframes IBM was selling as computers were tiny and slow compared with nearly any desktop or laptop PC now. Having one PC out of hundreds+ quit does not have to be serious problem.
Now lots of people and companies can set up serious, reliable, powerful computing installations, and IBM is no longer the only option.
And the IBM target customer is no longer such a big part of computing.
Another legacy company book HN'ers would really like for a Christmas gift is "Bill & Dave"
https://www.amazon.com/Bill-Dave-Hewlett-Packard-Greatest/dp...
the author is an unabashed fanboy, and the history ends with Mark Hurd before he imploded. Still, it's a great history of a (formerly) great company.
Yep, Leo Apotheker. Who also presided over the Autonomy mess.
I was an industry analyst until 2010 and HP servers and storage were pretty big clients. (I also know one of the journalists well who got their phone records accessed.) I was still in the industry after but not following HP day-to-day. I either missed Kara's later reporting or had just forgotten given that people were assuming something along those lines.
Regarding Mark Hurd, there was that funny story that his replacement Leo Apotheker burned 11 billion dollars on Autonomy purchase and HP had to write off ~9 billions in a year or two. Mark was at Oracle and refused to buy Autonomy at 6 billion dollars few months earlier.
Larry Ellison is also famous for his "can I buy you a car?" line for attractive women. ;)
The real villain, which you won't get from the press but the book tells you, is Richard Hackborn. He was offered the job before Fiorina, and turned it down.
https://www.nndb.com/people/181/000124806/
Hackborn was the genius behind their laser printer business. He hated HQ and stayed in Boise, which is probably why he didn't want the top job. But he was Fiorina's champion all the way through the Compaq merger debacle.
I'm reminded of the "HP Origins" video from 2006. There's a clip of Bill Hewlett towards the end, talking about the HP Way:
> "We hope that the people that'll follow us will have the same ideas...I don't think that a lot of these fundamental positions are going to change very much; they're too ingrained in the organisation." [0]
Sadly, this didn't come to pass.
Walter Hewlett and David Packard, Jr. really should have been groomed to take over. No skin in the game like having your name on the company.
[0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2023/11/26/what-punch-cards-tea...
Here's a fun Christmas themed one
Their Global Services division could be summarized as a War on Kernighan's Law. Find clever people, and have them strain themselves to stand up a system so complex that you not only need to keep paying GS to show up and maintain it, but in fact you probably need to hire two more people just to keep the wheels on.
That has made them many enemies on the technical side of things. People like me go out of our ways to sabotage any inroads they try to make because we know what will happen if we don't. Presentations of systems so complex you get a headache trying to wrap your mind around it.
If we talk about it, it's not for long and with as few ears to overhear as possible. It's like guerilla warfare. Targeted attacks against a foe who could crush you like a bug if they knew where to find you.
Oracle sniffing around is merely an irritation compared to the spectre of IBM GS getting their hooks into your CTO.
Any technical excellence at IBM is probably an island and definitely doesn't represent the rest of the company.
In my time there, only one thing mattered: head count (or more precisely, body count). It didn't matter if those heads could think. It was all about closing outsourcing contracts and making a profit. With the occasional sprinkle of Watson propaganda sprinkled on top to make it look like you were at the pinnacle of computing.
I'm surprised IBM still exists. I can't remember a single company that I worked for where IBM would have helped anything.
Then there was Weblogic, that worked as well and mostly by standards. Devs I met everywhere loved it.
MQSeries predates Java itself and started out on MVS; it was already the way it is when the JMS spec was developed. There's no real excuse for WebSphere, though.
PKI is like a kitchen knife. The hard part is not getting one, or picking it up, it's using it without cutting yourself. But people treat the 'knife' like all aspects are magical.
I've put my favorite learning resources and tools into https://www.bbkane.com/blog/learn-ssl/
It took from ~2 weeks after my start date until ~1 week before my last day to get a vSphere cluster provisioned for my development work.
PKI? Sounds hard, by comparison.
AS/400 can still be found in the checkout line at Costco. I don't think it is the main POS system but is used for things like looking up customer information. IIRC Oracle is taking a lot of that retailer backend business now.
I once saw the original architecture document and it was actually very nice -- though perhaps unorthodox. The implementation was like an encyclopedia of Worst Practices.
I also worked a summer for IBM Global Services doing some sysadmin and security work back in 1997... I'd characterize the whole thing as... mediocrity.
Another time, I worked a contract in another part of IBM and saw other parts and got to attend presentations and lectures there and see the patents on the walls, and be exposed to some of the really smart people and history there, and that product side of the organization (people who worked on DB2, etc.) seemed much better.
If memory serves I helped our IT guy replace the whole mess with Apache, so we’d never have to talk to them again. I used to compete with Netscape so there was no small amusement in costing them contractor hours.
I've long ago learned that people misremember all the time. I trust the person who quickly looks up the correct answer in the manual over the person who thinks they din't need the manual and uses what they think is right. Sure often the second person gets things right, but when they get it wrong they waste a lot of time trying to figure out which thing is wrong.
Nothing they were doing was worth $250 an hour.
In my very first consulting gig, my employer intentionally buried all of the best documentation on an internal forum. I can't even count all the hours I burned up on troubleshooting, only to learn days later that the thing I was encountering was a known issue that was completely undocumented and the only way to know that was to be present in the office... which was 3000 miles away.
I tried to get management to open up the forums to public consumption, but they were dead set against it, said that their "intellectual property was too valuable."
Well, if the firm doesn’t know how to engage in its core business, just fire the employees, close the offices, take the names off the buildings and return the capital to the owners!
Not all of the lost seeing stones have been accounted for. We don’t know who else may be listening.
If they want to be Sauron.
That's Palantir Technologies' customer base.
3 years a tens of millions later the whole project is shut down with no value delivered except a single data store and a couple API endpoints. That exec went back to his IBM sales job.
Last I heard they were still paying for and maintaining all of it because that endpoint was used in a key product offering.
A former manager at another fairly old-line company, it will presumably be the only company he will have ever worked for--albeit through a couple acquisitions and some stuff during dot-bomb.
I've worked in places that refused to allow us (IT) to write programs to automate processes that would have saved enough money yearly to buy a house. They were "severely concerned" because "if you leave or get hit by a bus, who will maintain it?"
I work at a place now where I can automate away with permission and prototype to show use case. I've been at this job a year and have already automated a goodly portion of the grunt work. Some of my colleagues look askance at me, and one has said, "you're automating us out of jobs, eventually, you do know this, right?" These guys/girls fear AI. I don't. I don't use it because God gave me a brain and I'm expected to exercise it. AI also feels like cheating to me. Sure, I may have to read the docs more, hit up someone on Stack Exchange, debug my code a little more, but you know what? I enjoy the challenge. I'm basically getting paid to have fun, despite the daily grind.
You're absolutely right about this on many levels. I also heard that quite a few times from my CEO, even though we often went with single smaller providers for things because he also wanted to cut corners.
In this case though, I'd say it was more about nepotism. The CEO wanted the deal with his old pals in exchange for access to the IBM sales pipeline so that we could sell their customers on storage deals on our hardware deployment. The only way to get access to the deals was to buy IBM hardware that was extremely over priced and far more "capable" than what we actually needed.
The fact that their sales teams outright lied about things they didn't even fully understand, was sickening for me. Thankfully other people on my team stepped up and helped prevent anything from moving forward.
I agree with you, automation is key.
I'm... Not seeing the logical connection here. If you could automate more of the work faster using AI than not using AI, why wouldn't you?
I don't want the answers, per se, I want guidance. AI would solve the issue for me. I don't want some bot thinking for me. I'll retire when I cannot suss out how to write code that solves problems or makes life easier.
And yes, I'm one of those holdouts who has never had the desire to even test out generative AI. I'm not worried about it supplanting me. I worried that I will lose my own edge and curiosity.
That is a good answer. Certain kinds of tools can become a crutch that limit you and stifle your own development. Maybe that's tolerable when it's not a core skill (e.g. never learning your way around your city because you only know how to react to GPS prompts), but when you're talking about a core job skill, it's a recipe for disaster (e.g. letting your skills atrophy or not developing them in the first place).
What is that French quote about: the more things change, the more they stay the same?
Or that George Santayana quote.
Which one?
I initially kind of assumed that most people would know about it, because it is a somewhat famous one, or at least, I've read it in many places. But your question made me realise that may not be the case. So, here it is, from the top of the above Wikipedia article about him, just below the header:
[ Santayana is popularly known for aphorisms, such as "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" ] .
IIRC, K&R said something similar in the first edition of their C book (referring to others' imagined reactions about the C strcmp function:
"What, you mean I have to call a function to compare two strings?"
They went on to add that they had tried to make C function call overhead quite low, to handle this issue.
For me, AI assistance has simply sped up the code I already know how to write (like structured test setups etc.) so I can focus more on the problems related to the business, which AI has no clue how to solve.
I use ChatGPT as a study partner in learning new direct-skills, as a soft-skills partner in navigating business dynamics, and a strategy partner in product work. It's very good at helping me learn to think better.
GPT 4 is basically useless for outputting the type of code (or writing) I need on a regular basis. It just doesn't have the right context to even be a viable tool beyond boilerplate/bootstrapping.
I mean... they kinda have a point don't they?
I was the sole maintainer on an app used by a Fortune 500 company, and if I were to get hit by a bus, it would've been very difficult (possibly impossible) to support it.
There was very little documentation, because nobody but me was maintaining it.
People are reverse engineering binary blobs, I’d say your software can be deciphered. It would be an hassle, but doable.
As an eng manager at an enterprise (not SV style tech) I differentiate between coders and developers.
Developers help our business by actively taking part in shaping software, automated workflows and integrations that makes us improve as a whole.
At lot of time is spent documenting and figuring out how that piece of software someone wrote 7 years ago, before us, works and what integrates.
This is why I firmly believe you need to tie documentation to running code in some way - at the very least a basic service graph that contains all services, dependencies and some metadata.
Tie this database to automatic firewall and proxy configuration and you’re on a good track.
We’ve on the other hand taken the strategic decision that tech and IT will help us win (is it the 90’s all over again?!) and we staff as such. A team is at least two, and no individual can own a service.
In one that I had direct experience in, they flew in one of the software's developers to do onsite troubleshooting. Also, being the hegemon of the tech world, IBM often would take the end-to-end role and not just stop at their boundary of a tech problem. I was involved in one in the late 1990's where we were running Netscape's iPlanet web server on an IBM JVM (on IBM's AIX) and it had a nasty memory leak in production where volumes were higher. We called Netscape and got what felt like a guy with a pager on the beach (it was outside business hours when we called); not helpful at all. We called IBM and things started to rock & roll. Eventually we had someone from their UK lab tracing the JVM until he found a JNI (Java Native Interface) call from external C-code (which would have been iPlanet's code) that had the wrong value for the flag that indicated who (JVM or C-code) should release the memory. He could have stopped there saying "not IBM's fault" but he just kept going reverse compiling the C-code to find the bad call. We were able to get back to Netscape saying in module yadayada.c, somewhere around line 47, there's a JNI call with flag=0, change it to flag=1. The patch from Netscape fixed the problem.
These infrequent critsits are something the C-suite remember for a very long time. They know that no way in hell their own staff could resolve these situations, especially in the days before the web, Stackoverflow, shared-knowledge, etc. If not for IBM squashing the bug, their bacon would be fried giving unsatisfactory explanations to their CEO.
The thing I've found that best captures the essence of IBM is how they love bringing *everyone* to every meeting, and then insist on full introductions. Every time.
I've been on a few different projects where we would routinely chew up 20 minutes of a 30 minute call hearing every last one of them announce their name and role. Thanks folks, I already know who you are. Can we talk about the project now?
My last interaction with them, I remember they kept claiming the sky was falling (aka schedule slip) if we didn’t rework the library to do exactly the API they worked out before any line of code was written and with no input from the four other teams that needed to consume it.
This culminated in 2 of our leads sitting in a room with a giant table, in a meeting of what had to be ten people at least, for three hours one afternoon while we dictated pseudocode and sequence diagrams for their next three months’ of work (if you can describe a month of work in an hour, it’s really not as complex as people are making it out to be)
So we paid six or seven of them to listen while we did half of their job for them, with our two most expensive employees.
I told him I didn't care what he called me, what mattered is whether people would listen to me when I asked them to do stuff, like use a better solution to a problem. If you want to be a lead, you have to do a lot of that yourself. But I was young (1st lead position) and his lack of backing that up were making it all more complicated than it needed to be.
Made all the weirder by the fact that he was good at selling people on ideas, to a fault (it took me 3 tries to quit that job, he was such a smooth talker)
That same other lead and I had figured out that IBM was perpetually 5 weeks behind, and always fishing for problems on other teams they could use to invoke day-for-day schedule slippage.
And the reason we knew it was five weeks is this: they would not take patches or hot fixes from us. Because doing so would indicate that we hadn’t fulfilled out contract to deliver on X date. So I’d give them version 1.0.4 (had to be exactly 1.0.4, if the CI/CD pipeline glitched and I gave them 1.0.5 they would demand an explanation, fuckers). And then I’d go off working on catching up with automating functional testing that we were still figuring out, trying to get it to run faster on one particular underpowered destination system, or get feedback from other teams about how some feature in the release was fundamentally broken, and I’d fix those problems and issue 1.0.5-7.
I’d tell them they needed the patch and they would say no. Then eight weeks after we gave it to them they’d complain it was broken, they are blocked, and the schedule will slip “day for day” until we fix the bugs - often bugs they should have seen week one if they were actually using the deliverables we gave them.
In one case it took me about 14 clock hours to fix their problem, but in all other cases I had already fixed that bug almost exactly six weeks before they found it. I just informed them that 1.0.7 already fixes that, upgrade. They were hoping for a week and every time they got less than a day, and only then if the meeting schedule aligned so the could stall for half a day. That was honestly one of the more satisfying aspects of that job.
Ten times they came at us with that schtick, and it worked once. Barely.
Near as I can tell they were spending a month at the beginning of each milestone cleaning up tech debt from stapling together the feature set for the previous milestone, and not getting around to our stuff until much later than they wanted the company to know.
We were almost always the first to say that we needed an extra week. Tons of harrumphing. We were, however, never (maybe 1 exception) the last team to ask for another week.
The thing is when we said we needed 1 week, it meant we needed 3-6 business days. When they said 1 week, it meant they were too scared to ask for three.
The inanity of the whole thing is that the project we were on was behind by a year that people would admit to (it was more like 30 months), so who the fuck cared if our division delivered our part three months late? It was going to collect a lot of cobwebs before it got properly exercised.
Bunch a drama with absolutely no purpose whatsoever.
For a while there, I had a weekly meeting at a former employer that had 63 people on it. The goal of the project was to change the IP address on an Oracle server.
Nobody wanted to take responsibility for the change, because if it broke, they might be unemployed.
So it just dragged on, week after week after week.
Anyway, the "job" involved more meetings than actual, real work. I'd guess 4 hours of meetings and status updates for every 1 hour of work. I don't know how some places even function.
Since this is the real "engineering" spirit that HNs love, I'm not going to argue. But I definitely prefer SpaceX' run and break things spirit.
My first computer was an IBM PS/2 Model 25. It came with a budget version of the Model M keyboard, but without the number pad. It’s still the gold standard for how a keyboard should feel. If it wasn’t an IBM computer then it was a cheap clone.
Later in life, I was inspired to go to law school because of the SCO vs IBM case, and the excellent lawyering by IBM’s counsel.
Now, it’s like watching a zombie movie. I don’t even know what they do anymore.
I have a theory that the death of the traditional computer company and it's buisness model, in the sense a company like an Oxide or IBM or Sun would understand the term "computer company", as well as the transition to the cloud for all new infrastructure, fundamentally changed the landscape in tech in a very negative way culturally speaking.
The hyperspecialization of the industry and consolidation of hardware into a single dominant platform for most serious buisness computing needs, obviated the need for traditional engineering cultures. It's hardly any wonder that this same transition also was a transition towards Agile development methods (or rather a cheap imitation of them, if it was ever even intended to be some paradigm shift at all).
The industry and the vibes I got were radically different and better even during ostensibly difficult times like right after dotcom.
The other big names do, they just rent it instead of selling it. All the data centers/custom processors in cloud services are hardware and software, not to mention Apple’s hardware for consumers, and Microsoft’s surface tablets and Xbox, and Alphabet’s phones, Meta’s headsets, Nvidia’s GPUs, etc.
Awesome brag: The road leading to the IBM Almaden front gate was fun to bike down.
> The company’s technological accomplishments are still recognizable as the forerunners of the digital era, yet its culture of social responsibility—a focus on employees rather than shareholders, restraint in executive compensation, and investment in anti-poverty programs—proved a dead end.
And loose narrative, without ever tying the two together at all.
How was this culture of social responsibility a "dead end" exactly? Oh, it's just a vibe. Let's talk about Watson family drama.
I am not sure how the anti-poverty programs tie in but most likely they were just scrapped as no longer in fashion.
I find this attitude to be fairly trite and disingenuous. Maybe we should ask millennials and zoomers what exactly it is that Goldman Sachs does or Dow or Cisco or any other large company that doesn't sell majority direct to consumer and see if we get a more intelligible answer. Just because a company isn't selling to you specifically doesn't mean it's a failure. I'm happy to criticize IBM, but let's do it for legitimate reasons (trend chasing, perhaps?) and not "my 16 year old doesn't know what they do so they must not be relevant"
For a brief, maybe fifteen year period out of their 100 year history. And even those weren't big sellers. Point being, I don't know that it was ever reasonable to ask the "man on the street" what IBM does, and expect anything but a vague answer.
Hell, my mother used to program their 370s and System/38s (precursor to the AS400). I haven't asked, but if asked the same question, I wouldn't be shocked if her answer were, "wait, they're still in business?"
Any time there's a conversation about computers, she'll pipe in with remarks about how "Compaq makes the best computers".
More like 34 years.
The IBM PC debuted in 1981, and they sold their PC business to Lenovo in 2005.
> And even those weren't big sellers.
Still, let's not downplay the impact that the IBM PC had on the industry.
Ask people about any large company in their own industry and they would know at least one of their products or services, and that includes Goldman Sachs, Dow, or Cisco.
It depends on how "working in tech" is defined.
If you work in IT at a Fortune 500 bank, insurance company, telco, manufacturing company, etc. then you almost certainly Know who IBM, SAP, Oracle, etc. are. If you work for FAANGMULA and adjacent SV companies you probably don't especially if you are under 35 or so.
I don't think it is even controversial to argue this so long as we can agree that a company cannot call itself a tech company simply because they hired a lot of programmers and are paying them decent salaries.
A tech company is a company that makes most of their money selling computer hardware and software products (and to a lesser extent, services and support for software and hardware products although it could be argued that is a different classification but with substantial overlap).
Notably, it has to be computers, not entertainment delivered via computers, or ads delivered through computers, and not industrials or pharmaceuticals or any number of other "technical but not 'tech' as in computers" industries. Tech is and has always meant IT, as in companies that are in the information and computers businesses. Where programmers happen to work, make the highest salary, or be the most highly concentrated has never mattered.
Have you read how much cash Meta has burned on VR? Apple on its R&D? Nvidia? Amazon and Microsoft and the rest on cloud (that requires R&D too, they can’t just go out and buy it).
> The business model is 100% a media and entertainment buisness model for most of the companies on that list.
Nonsense if you read any of the financial statements, except for Netflix.
Your additional examples aren't really counter examples most probably for most people; you've just listed additional companies that are likely common enough names that no one else outside the tech/finance sphere really knows why the name is a known name. I don't see this as disingenuous, I see as an accurate reflection of the modern interpretation of many of these older companies. Apple for example is "relatively" old(er), but you can ask anyone what you might get from Apple right now and probably they can name at least one thing like "oh yeah they make good phones" or "I like their laptops."
My entire professional career has been in IT/Programming, and the best I can tell you about what IBM offers is "eh, you can pay a ton for a contract for some server hardware/software. Hardware support is fine, but the rest is a dice roll on what you're actually getting for your money." I don't associate IBM at this point with a specific service or product I'd seek so much as just "this is a tech company that you pay a ton of money to and hope it works out for your project".
Though I will give them credit for their LTO tape hardware -- that is solid and straight forward enough for my tastes.
My personal experience, half the time I talk to IBM sales team or even their engineering team, I end up with far more questions than answers, and I get the distinct impression I'm offending the IBM rep for even questioning what they're saying, no matter how ridiculous their statements are. I know what the words they're saying mean and I understand what the tech is, but when I have practical questions about their design choices or implementation guidance and the IBM employees act as if they resent me for questioning them, I too wonder why IBM is really trying to accomplish in our meetings -- do they want to sell something that will help with my problem scope or do they just want lock-in? This question isn't unique to IBM naturally, but if that's what ends up occupying my mind after a meeting with IBM representatives, I'm quite certain it's an indicator that it's not something I want my team to get wrapped up in.
Edit: Changed "else outside the tech sphere" to "else outside the tech/finance sphere"
And how could anyone in Canada forget the Phoenix pay system. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system
1) What