Comment by parasubvert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by parasubvert | Hacker News Reader

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Keep in mind that IBM is the 3rd largest software company in the world, behind Oracle and Microsoft, with around $28 billion in annual revenue JUST from software (out of their total $100 billion). Revenue has been mostly flat for the past 7 years, though they've been squeezing out more profitability. That's a big ship to turn around.

That said there are plenty of examples of IBM doing new things, just the question is whether it's enough...

- IBM BlueMix, and IBM is actively contributing to Cloud Foundry (particularly the new Diego runtime): http://www-01.ibm.com/software/bluemix/

- IBM Watson analytics is also fairly impressive: http://www.ibm.com/analytics/us/en/index.html

- The Jazz.net products for agile requirements and development tracking are fairly modern and has a happy customer base (replacing the older crap Rational ClearCase stuff): https://jazz.net

- They've also acquired some good software, such as Urban Code, for automated app deployment: http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/ucdep

Pretty much the entire software sales force is pushing cloud/devops, mobile, and analytics, which are the bulk of their new license streams. Their maintenance stream is still the large annuity from the mass of WebSphere, Tivoli, DB2, Lotus, and mainframe legacy deployed out there over the past 30+ years...

IBM has its place, especially in the big enterprise. However, more and more I'm seeing that's not the case.

Working for a big insurance co., we're seeing a big shift toward a "devops-like culture", and a lot of the time that means less IBM.

IBM not only needs to refresh their offerings, they need to refresh their image. The common feeling around here is IBM products are slow, buggy, and pieced together quickly from a ton of other acquisitions who are then "IBM-ized" together.

They look beautiful on paper, in a way that speaks to both execs and real tech people alike. But once you build it out and start trying to support it...

> They look beautiful on paper, in a way that speaks to both execs and real tech people alike. But once you build it out and start trying to support it...

To be fair, you just described most enterprise software systems. :)

I think you mean "most software systems", period. :-)

I don't know about that. Most software can be bad, but enterprise software tends to be a special kind of bad. The big problem with enterprise is that the buyers are not the users. Therefore, the incentives are not aligned and the result is extremely poor quality software.

I agree with most of what you just said, but that doesn't really contradict what I said. I guess I could have been more verbose, but I meant to reply to:

"But once you build it out and start trying to support it..."

which suggests that the topic is something like "systems that start out elegant, pristine and pure, and slowly accrete functionality and complexity, and become brittle, unstable, and hard to maintain and support". And I posit that this applies to pretty much all software, not just "enterprise software".

I mean, there's a reason we have aphorisms and memes like Greenspun's Tenth Rule[1], Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment[2], the Turing Tarpit[3], the Inner Platform Effect, etc.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski.27s_law...

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit

[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect

Yup. The ship can be saved (and probably will - they have many smart people), but it's not clear how yet. Currently they have a major brand problem among the young generation.

I grew up when IBM still had a cool factor with Team OS/2, etc., but other than BlueMix there's not much left.

WebSphere, calling it a bloated, buggy, outdated, overpriced pice of shit would be a compliment. I'll do PHP before I do WebSphere. I'll go jobless before I do WebSphere.

ClearCase is the reason why I'll never pay one cent to IBM in software if I can.

That's what they sell, overpriced crap sold in a golf course.

ClearCase came from the Rational acquisition, which came from an Atria acquisition. It dates back to the early 90s.

And it shows, as I learned in the late '00s. Utter crap.

I know that, but it doesn't matter.

Your name tag, your responsibility. And from what I hear other IBM tools are crap as well (like Tivoli)

Want to see an exemplar acquisition? Visio. They were so Office like, MS almost "PnP" it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visio

Visio? That terrible UI that makes drawing even a simple flowchart or network diagram a total pain in the ass? I have not seen 2013 but earlier versions were not MS-ified as far as user experience. It always stuck out. In fact, I use Word's drawing editor for some diagrams because it's easier than Visio. It was not PnP and took them a few versions to even make it look like it might possibly been made by Office.

ClearCase still gives me nightmares... So happy we migrated to git. Then we also got out of the horrid jazz products.

I've declined job offers specifically based on the line "Experience with ClearCase is a plus", even when I needed a job. I'll never use that irrational BS again. When your company's source control is so unintuitive/messed up that you need to hire people to keep it working, things have failed.

Yeah, it was horrible. And so many places still haven't moved to RTC which isn't Github, but it's an order of magnitude better than CC/CQ.

As a former IBM'er, I believe IBM has lost their edge as a competitive company, and is now in a state of dysfunction and damage control. Bluemix, Watson, Jazz SCM, in my opinion all these initiatives are too little and too late.

In their attempt to meet the now defunct 2015 road map, IBM has axed many talented and experienced employees. You can only layoff so many individuals before it starts negatively affecting your product and talent pool.

From what I hear on the inside, STG has been cut to the core after numerous rounds of layoffs and product/division sell-offs. SWG appears to be the next target, current rumors indicate that there may be another large layoff sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

They also recently acquired cloudant, which is much like couchDB but as a Database as a service.

Was going to mention this as well. Samsung Ventures has also invested. Good potential in the mobile space.

Jazz is an abysmal product compared to JIRA.

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