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Comment by pacifika | Hacker News Reader

50 year grudges are not relevant there is no one still at ibm that worked there in 1977, IMHO.

It’s the ship of Theseus in corporate form. Even if all the people are gone but the culture hasn’t changed, is the criticism inaccurate?

I mean, okay, but you're taking the current leadership's words and claiming they are incorrect because IBM management was not great at identifying trends decades ago. Historical trend is not an indicator of the future and it's not engaging in good faith on the conversation if overspending on AI can be backed by revenue in the future. You're attacking the messenger instead of the message.

I didn't read the top level comment as dismissive or 'proving it wrong', but rather as adding context, or even being humorous somewhat

I don't understand how calling something "a ship of Theseus in corporate form" or "culture hasn't changed" etc, is not dismissive of the actual comment by the CEO on AI overspending. They dismissed the content of the message by saying IBM's culture sucks, is how i read it. Also things can be funny and dimissive at the same time, they often are.

I’m saying given IBMs track record of completely failing at innovation repeatedly and failing at investing on the correct technologies, why do you assume today’s CEO is better at it and has bucked the milquetoast culture that has pervaded IBM? It’s a company that has largely divested its ability to provide solutions and technology and turned more into a large shop consultancy (+ milking their legacy mainframe contracts and whatnot).

Except that, over the same time period, IBM was also very successful at innovation and investing in technologies. Yes, they made some very high-profile misses that the top poster lists, but they were still a powerhouse doing other stuff during that time (as a commenter replying to that points out).

Except all the technologies listed were basically in the heydey of the 70s and 80s. Gerstner redirected IBM into an enterprise services business in the early 90s and by the late 90s that's where all their money was. The 2002 acquisition of PwC consulting cemented this shift. In the mid 2010s under Ginni Rometty IBM software became secondary and it abandoned selling it as standalone software instead bundling it into its consultancy.

So IBM hasn't been doing hardware R&D for about three decades and abandoned software R&D well over a decade ago. R&D hasn't been in their DNA for a long time, their previous contributions notwithstanding.

> So IBM hasn't been doing hardware R&D for about three decades

Even a 5 second google search says you are wrong.

https://research.ibm.com/semiconductors/ai-hardware-center

https://research.ibm.com/topics/quantum-hardware

Having a research department is very different from whether they are actually accomplishing anything and whether or not it is a meaningful revenue stream. On all fronts this is just not true. The quantum stuff so far in the industry is vapor ware and its unclear wether IBM is really making forward progress vs yearly pronouncements of progress to keep the funding stream open

You said they hadn’t one. Google search said you were wrong.

You don’t get to change the goalposts.

> Even if all the people are gone but the culture hasn’t changed

Can you expand on this? What was the culture then versus now?

For example back then it was the culture to have suit inspectors ensure you had the right clothes on and even measure your socks. (PBS Triumph of the Nerds)

Culture evolution can be very fast, yet some cultures stick around for a very long time.

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