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Comment by smokefoot | Hacker News Reader

Which is so weird, right? Like what is IBM now and how does a research lab make sense with the rest of their business?

The money-making parts of IBM are: legacy software and hardware (declining), consulting (low margin, low leverage), enterprise software (mostly redhat, not really growing). It's hard to explain how IBM research is accretive to any of that.

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Licensing is a substantial source of revenue, and their servers have very impressive (think Telum’s caching) innovations, even though they rely on third-parties for manufacturing the chips themselves.

They are also betting on quantum computing to become commercially relevant.

The hardware division has 80%+ margin and still makes the systems that process 75% of all financial transactions. Their processors for those systems are on par or better than any other, I don’t think that is a business at all. This cash cow is not going away any time soon and gives them the profits to make bets on the future of computing.

I don't know enough about their business to say, but I'm thrilled at even the idea that someone might actually value long-term success over quarterly earnings.

IBM at one time had nearly everything in modern tech under their roof like Xerox and squandered it. There is no comeback for them.

They were the second American chip company that said no to Steve Jobs when hinted about designing smaller better chip mobile devices the other two were Motorola and Intel Apple had to eventually do it themselves. Apple Silicon

Isn't consulting one of the most high-margin areas in general?

Doubt it. Consulting firms run 30% gross margin and operating margins in The single digits or teens. I’d bet IBMs legacy portfolio is 40%+ operating margins.

Sometimes you might hear private partnerships quote gross margins in the 40s or 50s but that’s implicitly gross of partner labor and comp so it’s not apples to apples.

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