IBM Technology Atlas
ibm.com
ibm.com
They each get in their car, fasten their seatbelt, and back out of their storage bay onto the road. They tune their radio to a morning zoo being visited by a reeling ninth caller who didn’t win the free party pack.
They depart the trunk line and park in a fragmented matrix of similarly unique cars, de-safety their belt, rummage the console for an identity token, and head into their own morning zoo, paned wall-to-wall with one-way glass, seemingly installed backwards.
The humans shed the remaining vestiges of their real human mornings and dutifully touch base on how to liven up their portable document that contentfully explores, ”how can technology further deliver value to our audience?” perhaps using hypertext, while drinking more coffee.
Anyways… If you haven’t clicked “client value” at the top-right, I strongly encourage doing so. Ten points and a free party pack if you can read the entire thing with a straight face.
Don’t worry. They don’t know either.
It means give them more money.
Semi-seriously I’m wondering though: when did corporate rhetoric shift from “creating value” - which almost makes rapacious capitalism sound benign - to shamelessly “capturing” that value? It’s as if they want to give the Marxists a reason to think they were right all along.
This reminds me of this video. This Is How Companies REALLY Come Up With 'Organisational Values': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1Xn0EUrQg0
Love the ending! "They don't reflect reality! If they reflected reality then the values of a company like Boeing would be Not. Quite. Enough. Bolts. But that's not their values, that's not their values. Their values are - and I swear I'm not making this up - their actual values are Safety, Quality, Integrity, Transparency. Well James In fairness, their planes are very transparent. They do deliver on transparency, that is true."
Yeah, that's some seriously ultra-processed corporate-speak mumbo-jumbo.
I upvoted the OP only because of your comment.
Many others on HN will, like me, scoff at the OP but appreciate your comment.
It's my favorite thing to read statements like this that somehow provide negative information.
I was pulled into a meeting once at a startup years ago where they were asking some of the engineers to review the company's new core values and they were all like this. We nodded along, because who wants to tell the HR director that these aren't human (and generally speaking, don't matter). On the bright side, I got to poke fun at our core values of "Having fun" that had a bunch of zany and goofy emoji faces suffixed onto it.
"And here's a rendering of the building where we will process worthless humans into valuable silicon resources!"
That's a bit cruel. I just won the party pack, but lost all desire to enjoy anything in the process.
Its not that someone writes that sort of stuff, its that it people read and think "yeah! give me some of that!" that makes me worry for humanity.
It seems to be describing a series of high-end sales calls, in the form of a management consulting engagement, with the question of, "How can I send IBM more business, and can you help me make slide decks to pitch this idea internally?"
That's not necessarily bad. You could do a lot worse on vendors or consultants.
(And what's the saying? "Nobody ever got fired for hitching their wagon to an IBM sales team.")
The AI and quantum roadmaps are an albatross for a company like this. They'll always come up in 2nd place or worse. The competition is insane. Meanwhile, there are maybe 3 other humans on earth with the means and conviction to build a competitor to their mainframe business today. It's one of the better moats in technology. It's not the biggest or most lucrative one, but no one wants to touch it because the captive audience would never risk an alternative.
Data is still IBM's best hope. It's always what they've done well. Especially the very important "core" data of complex enterprises. Things like the account balances and transactions for all customers at a bank. DB2 is easily the most compelling mainframe service and I don't ever see that changing.
I compare those (long-term roadmaps) with automakers showing-off concept-cars, and I like what John Gruber wrote about those[1]:
> Concept designs (and worse, concept videos) are a sign of dysfunction and incompetence at a company. It’s playing make-believe while fooling yourself and your audience into thinking you’re doing something real. Concepts allow designers to ignore real-world constraints: engineering, pricing, manufacturing, legal regulations, sometimes even physics. But dealing with real-world constraints is the hard work of true design. Concepts don’t stem from a lack of confidence. They stem from a dereliction of the actual duties of design.
Similarly, this vacuous concept-of-a roadmap from IBM is clearly free from real-world constraints; constraints like AI telling people to eat rocks...
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2020/01/concept_electronics_show
In addition to that, the products internally developed like AskHR are awful obstacle courses one has to scramble through to reach a human.
Poor quality garbage being pushed to CEOs by marketing types.
For example:
1. They missed the move to Cloud and eventually shifted focus to "hybrid" cloud, which allowed them to keep selling their existed software and hardware.
2. They missed the move to SaaS, trying instead to sell expensive on-prem enterprise software like Notes and Commerce, both of which they eventually sold to HCL.
3. Even though they were pioneers in virtualization, they were more interested in bundling their software on expensive appliances than enabling it to run in VMs.
The one thing they can predict is when something is on the verge of commoditization, at which point they decide it's too difficult to make money on and sell it off, e.g. PCs, laptops, hard drives, POS systems.
>>
2024: Scale generative AI–infused workloads across the multi-cloud.
2025: Evolve the hybrid cloud for generative AI.
2027: Deliver an open platform for sovereign AI.
2029: Realize the convergence of bits, neurons, and qubits.
2030: Enable one seamless compute.
2024: Scale bacon-infused omelet making across multi-pan
2025: Evolve hybrid cooking for generative food
2027: Deliver an open platform for sovereign food making
2029: Realize the convergence of omelets, burritos, and hash browns
2030: Enable one seamless breakfast food
That is where they ended on the AI track.
I think that's very prudent. No sense alarming prospective customers with the stages that follow on from there.
If there are questions, just say "singularity" and smile!
Also all this "vision 2030" stuff are getting too over the top.
But I like it, you can expect some of these terms more frequently in upcoming years, which can shape your investment decisions. People buy the hype, if you are early in the hype cycle you can increase your investments