The Trouble With IBM | Hacker News Reader

The Trouble With IBM

businessweek.com

22 pointsomh5 comments

CIA CTO kind of touched on it:

Hunt said that the intelligence agency adopted Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build its own procurement system. "The security was really superb," he said, noting that this was also true for a lot of other cloud providers. That security, he said, was end-to-end and on every layer of the infrastructure onion.

For the chief information officer, Hunt explained, inner security is just as important as the fence around a company's networks.

"If they can't find you, they can't attack you. And if they find you and attack you, you want to be really hard to attack," he said.

http://www.zdnet.com/former-cia-cto-speaks-out-on-snowden-le...

Cringely has written some interesting pieces about it. He seems to essentially think that the current management is just trying to suck the last bits of value from the organization. http://www.cringely.com/?s=ibm

As the article for this topic, and Cringely's current 2nd and subsequently articles in that search point out, the previous CEO made a promise to massively increase earnings by 2015. In the face of declining sales/revenue, there aren't that many ways to accomplish that, and of course few aren't actively harmful to its future.

The most interesting quote for me:

A federal judge agreed, ruling in October that with the “overall inferiority of its proposal,” IBM “lacked any chance of winning” the contract. The corporate cliché of the 1970s and ’80s, that no one ever got fired for buying IBM, had never seemed less true

On the other hand, further down, that cloud offering is being retired:

"[CEO as of 2012] Rometty’s most significant investment has been SoftLayer Technologies, a smaller rival to Amazon in selling cloud computing to companies. IBM paid $2 billion for SoftLayer last summer, in the middle of its bruising CIA fight with Amazon, and afterward began to wind down its own corporate cloud product."

Whether SoftLayer's people can survive in IBM's culture ... well, look at this compared to, oh, Watson, Sr's 1911 "THINK":

"Last year [Rometty] began distributing black plastic cards bearing the phrase “One Purpose: Be essential” to IBM’s roughly 50,000 managers and has been known to demand to see them as she walks the halls. At IBM, even clarity is complicated—on the back of the cards are three values and nine instructions for making customers happy, including “Unite to get it done now” and “Treasure wild ducks.”"

And while the article doesn't mention that services as a business line are typically a race to the bottom, it does go into how the cloud looks like a game of thin margins, which doesn't fit IBM at all.

Lots more bad news further down.

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