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Comment by helsinkiandrew | Hacker News Reader

> IBM has not exactly had a stellar record at identifying the future.

IBM invented/developed/introduced magnetic stripe cards, UPC Barcodes, the modern ATM, Hard drives, floppies, DRAM, SQL, the 360 Family of Mainframes, the PC, Apollo guidance computers, Deep Blue. IBM created a far share of the future we're living in.

I'm no fan of much of what IBM is doing at the moment but it could be argued that its consultancy/service orientation gives it a good view of how business is and is planning to use AI.

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They also either fairly accurately predicted the death of HDDs by selling off their research division before the market collapsed, or they caused the end of the HDD era by selling off their research division. They did a lot of research.

I think the retail market is maybe dead but datacenters are still a fairly large customer I’d think. HDDs really shine at scale where they can be fronted by flash and DRAM cache layers.

They are still cheaper than flash for cold data, but that’s not going to hold for long. Flash is so much denser the acquisition cost difference for a multi-petabyte store becomes small next to the datacenter space and power needed by HDDs. HDDs require research for increasing density while flash can rely on silicon manufacturing advances for that - not that it doesn’t require specific research, but being able to apply the IP across a vast space makes better economical sense.

The hdd being dead will surely come as a surprise to the couple of 12TB rusties spinning joyously in my case right now.

One family down the street from me still drives a Saturn! Yet no one is going to say "Saturn isn't dead!".

Nope. It is like - suddenly every truck everywhere is Saturn. The unit count may be lower but the total tonnage moved grows. While HDD shipments have fallen fourfold counted in units, if you check total exabytes delivered you will see they are shipping a lot.

HDDs would be much more important today if flash storage didn’t exist.

did you know that SSD are not memory stable if they dont get electricity every now and again...

Spinning platters are prone to catastrophic mechanical failure and tape can undergo delamination. What of it?

Do you know how much data is stored on ssds in data centres?

The other way to look at it is that the entire consulting industry is teetering on catastrophe. And IBM, being largely a consulting company now, is not being spared.

IBM isn't failing, though. They're a profitable company with healthy margins, and enterprises continue to hire them for all sorts of things, in large numbers.

So now it makes more sense why they think the AI spending will/need to fail.

Because if it didn't, that's a direct replacement of them.

AI replaces nothing. A consultant or developer is not replaced with AI, he becomes more powerful with AI. An IBM consultant with AI is still way ahead of Johnny Startup with AI.

> The other way to look at it is that the entire consulting industry is teetering on catastrophe

Oh? Where'd you get that information?

If you mean because of AI, it doesn't seem to apply much to IBM. They are probably not great at what they do like most such companies, but they are respectable and can take the blame if something goes wrong. AI doesn't have these properties.

If anything there’s likely plenty of work for body shops like IBM in reviewing and correcting AI-generated work product that has been thrown into production recently.

This is a separate argument though. A failing company may still be right in identifying other companies failure modes.

You can be prescient about failure in one area and still fail yourself. There's no gotcha.

IBM is not a failing company though, they are a Goliath in the Enterprise space.

Still besides the point. The company failing or not is orthogonal to them being able to identify failure in others.

> A failing company may still be right in identifying other companies failure modes.

Agreed if this is what they are doing, but what if theyre spewing claims to try and discredit an industry in order to quell their shareholder concerns?

They are not the only ones looking at the money spent in AI datacentres and concluding most of the investment will not be recovered anytime soon.

A lot of the silicon being deployed is great for training, but inefficient for inference and the training to inference ratio for usage shows a clear tendency to go the inference way. Furthermore, that silicon, with the workloads it runs, doesn’t last long and needs replacement.

The first ones to go online might recover the investment, but the followers better have a plan to pivot to other uses.

IBM was making "calculating cheese cutters" back in the day [0].

I'm sure they can pivot to something else if the need arises.

[0]: https://imgur.com/a/ibm-cheese-cutter-Rjs2I

The whole point of a consultant is to let the execs blame someone else.

Nobody got fired for buying something Gartner recommended, or for following EY's advice to lay off/hire

I don't see AI taking that blame away.

They own Red Hat Linux, Ansible, OpenShift, and Terraform.

If you are doing anything in the Enterprise space, they probably have their claws in you be it on-prem or cloud.

And their work on quantum...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/baldwin/2025/11/25/inside-ibms-...

Not to mention they are still doing quite a bit of Mainframe...

IBM is/was good at inventing a lot of tech.

It may not be good at recognizing other good tech invented or paradigm changes by others

Nor is their CEO in any way unbiased.

> IBM invented/developed/introduced magnetic stripe cards, UPC Barcodes, the modern ATM, Hard drives, floppies, DRAM, SQL, the 360 Family of Mainframes, the PC, Apollo guidance computers, Deep Blue. IBM created a far share of the future we're living in.

Well put. “IBM was wrong about computers being a big deal” is a bizarre take. It’s like saying that Colonel Sanders was wrong about chicken because he, uh… invented the pressure fryer.

Nitpicking, IBM did non develop _the_ Apollo Guidance Computer (the one in the spacecraft with people), it was Raytheon. They did, however, developed the Launch Vehicle Digital Computer that controlled the Saturn rocket in Apollo missions. AGC had very innovative design, while LVDC was more conventional for that time.

I've heard some second hand stories about IBM's way of using "AI" and it is pretty much business oriented and not much of the glamour and galore promises the other companies make (of course you still have shiny new things in business terms). It's actually good entertainment hearing all the internal struggles of business vs fancy during the holidays.

For the fact that they invented Deep Blue, they are really struggling with AI

Their Granite family of models is actually pretty good! They just aren't working on the mainstream large LLMs that capture all the attention.

IBM is always very conscious of what their clients need (and the large consultancy business provides a very comprehensive view). It just turns out their clients don’t need IBM to invest in large frontier models.

ibm developed SSMs/mamba models and also releasing trainings datasets i think, also quantum computing is strategic option..

For sure but do you see them at any relevant leader boards? Any news how good they are?

I don't.

I know their models, but not because i constantly read about it

https://huggingface.co/ibm here is very interesting research going https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite

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