Next Week's Bloodbath At IBM Won't Fix The Real Problem

It's shitty, but I'm sure a company as big as IBM will make sure they're ass is covered.

Except that "people", i.e. employees, are not the decision makers when it comes to what software/hardware they get.

1. I am claiming that for many of these battles, it's not simply political. It's a fight for the existential foundation of what the organization should be all about. When the web team at Microsoft went head-to-head with the Windows team in the late 90s, that wasn't simply a brouhaha over who should get power. It was much more than that. It was a question about Microsoft's future ability to dominate/survive/die. Yes, the weapons to fight the battles and the war are political in nature. But something at that level isn't simply about the politics.

> You're most often actually fighting a political battle masqueraded as something else, and a necessary shift is to recognize that early on.

Likewise, let’s not let the weapons being used mislead us to incorrectly conclude what the fight's really all about.

2. Once the strategy has been decided by the top, it's hard for one person, especially at lower levels, to change the momentum. The executive team is all in. If an executive is not all in, the executive is demoted, reallocated, or leaves the company. It's the CEO's job to get his/her executive team on the same page. He/she should have the political savvy necessary to accomplish this. It’s each executive's job to get their directors on the same page. It's each director's job to get their senior management team on the same page. It's each senior manager's job to get their managers on the same page. And it keeps trickling down until it reaches the bottom. A CEO who is not able to achieve this organizational buy-in cannot be considered someone who can lead the company. Someone at the bottom cannot and will not change the existential direction of the company, no matter how politically savvy he/she is.

Once Microsoft settled that Windows would be their focus and won the browser wars with IE6, they sat on that for years. It would not have mattered how politically talented you were, you were not going to convince Microsoft to invest into improving IE for a long, long time. Pretty much the only way to win at this is to be a super genius and create something fantastic on your own time in secret from the organization. Like the story of how OSX was ported to x86. http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/11/3077651/apple-intel-mac-os... Otherwise, you need a concerted effort from multiple parties and sponsorship and political protection from a very senior level.

3. > It will never be fun all the time. But you're there for some reason, and the alternative is at best purposeless mediocrity.

Or you can leave if you can’t find any reason to stay. Staying can also mould you into purposeless mediocrity, whether or not you resist it. Let’s not underestimate our environment’s ability to influence our life, mindset, and behaviour. When I was graduating from university, I asked a prof which job offer I should take. He said whatever I choose, be careful if I choose the larger corporations. He said they’re like zoos. If you stay in them too long, you become tame and become unable to survive in the wild again.

Another piece of advice I received from a very senior engineer who had run his own fairly successful company was to always be aware of companies where decisions and promotions are made based on politics instead of data and merit. In such organizations, the people who stay and get promoted are the ones who are the most politically savvy, not necessarily the ones who are correct/capable. Sometimes there’s overlap. Often, there isn't. Ultimately, I think we have to decide if we’re more interested in becoming good at politics or good at doing our real jobs. Politics are supposed to be a means to an end, not the final product that a customer receives. As such, it’s better to have people who are good at product, and it’s just a nice bonus if they’re also good at politics because politics are inevitable, especially as an organization grows. But the focus should never be on politics primarily.

Note: I've never worked for Microsoft, I've only cited their examples here because their history is so well-documented through various books and media, especially due to their monopoly trial. I just chose the example that I thought would best get my point across. I have worked in other large corporations where my job was to create organization-wide disruptive change. We actually won an international award for it. But nobody would relate to that stuff. ;) My thoughts are mostly taken from those experiences, Microsoft is just the vehicle to convey those thoughts.

Funny thing is, all the consultants who specialize in these products are awful pseudo-programmers & I end up bypassing their techs (WMB, BPM, etc.) with pure Java solutions whenever possible since the overhead of speaking to them creates like a 10x productivity loss. If the nosy busybodies (awful below average pseudo-programmers within our own group) didn't tattle to mgmt to help them reign us back in, the whole company would be none-the-wiser & we'd get work done at breakneck speed... ALL MOST OF US NEED IS A GODDAMN SPRING OR EE CONTAINER + THE JVM, hah.

Over time, companies accumulate cruft... employees who underperform. Same thing with governments and their programs (not software).

One of the ways to clean house is to dump a massive chunk and rehire the people on an as needed basis, likely with higher pay. The company has still managed to get rid of the dead weight, and the employees who are genuinely needed get more money. Similar to doing a clean OS reinstall.

That's the theory anyway. Very disruptive but it can be successful.

The way they answer questions is very, very different. Watson effectively translates the question into something equivalent to an SQL query, then executes it, and answers the top result.

What a human mind does is very, very different. It could perhaps be described like this : "put the electrical impulses on the outgoing nerves that seem like past successful Jeopardy players would have put on theirs in this situation". Your mind doesn't "answer" any question for starters. It simply reacts to the situation, the difference is in that your mind doesn't know or care about the difference between a question and a rocket falling out of the sky. Same prediction happens.

This reaction contains far more data than Watson will ever output. It contains the actual answer, encoded in had movements necessary to write them down. It contains instructions to pick up the pen, hold the board, crouch over the board so your hand would be in reach of the board, hide the answer from your competitors, ... You could easily write a 1000-page book about the response of your mind to simple situations (I've read a near-2000 page book that talks exclusively about the 3d math needed to control two fingers). This answer was produced by your cortex, which contains more computing elements than the internet. More data was transferred in your mind to weak computing elements than gets transferred on the internet in an entire US state for the same time frame. Granted, those computing elements are somewhat (a LOT) slower than a CPU, but there's 100 neurons in your cortex for every CPU ever sold, which is estimated to be a billion. (and I'm cheating with those numbers, for example the total data transfer that occurs in a single CPU easily outstrips internet traffic for a medium city. So your mind looks at the same amount of data as about a dozen cpus in the same time, much less impressive)

Fundamentally it's the "best" reaction your mind knows how to have. Best being defined something along the lines of "if you did this in front of me, you'd get maximum attention from my mind" (in this case hopefully because you'd win Jeopardy. But it's the attention that matters, not the win. E.g. if your girl/boyfriend plays, you'll play more like him/her, regardless of who wins).

I also think IBM has the right model by creating Watson as a service on 30% revenue share -> Let external developers find all the various products and business models. They'll be better at finding and optimizing new products than a services companies would be and some of them will be able to go after much smaller products. You end up with more diversification and less of IBM's capital at risk for 30% of what's likely to be a much larger pie than IBM can generate on their own.

It's easy to suspect that the main goal of the Watson computer playing Jeopardy was really just luster.

Really, there were some severely negative attitudes on (1) Research working on projects that could result in revenue and (2) transferring projects from Research to the rest of the company for development or sales. Our project in Research was quite exceptional and transferred two projects, both of which went to customers and got sold, but our group was unusual, and our success was not wanted by the higher ups.

At one time Gerstner mentioned "all the exciting projects coming out of Research" -- right, about like the wings about to sprout on all those pigs.

The explanation I like about IBM is one given to me by the manager of the Chicago branch office: "You might think of IBM as an electronics company or a computer company, but you would be wrong. IBM is a marketing company, and it would get into the grocery business tomorrow if it saw a business opportunity there. You might think that Research comes up with new product designs, development turns them into products, and marketing sells them, but that is exactly backwards. Instead, marketing figures out what they can sell, development builds it, and they go to Research if necessary."

So, maybe the current changes amount to IBM trying some new things to market.

Something like "What's the minimum supported number of CPUs to run IBM DB2 on a new system Z?" or another customer-focused question.

Things like that don't require any insight, but would be a boon to the sales/marketing team when the customer has questions of that ilk.

Yes, that's positioning Watson simply as a better search, but what was Google, originally, other than better search than Altavista?

The mainframes have their own CISC type architecture and typically have massive amounts of cache and a high clock speed (5Ghz and above)

Their instructions sets are also different in that its not strictly of the von-Neumann variety. Mainframes can do things like memory copies directly in memory without requiring copying via registers. This kind-of attacks the von-Neumann bottleneck directly and is good for batch and high volume transaction processing.

The software for mainframes is also typically fused into their kernels, things like CICS and DB2 are not "user" programs, they're part of the OS so I/O is handled much better and things don't "block" as much.

But people have been predicting the death of big iron for several decades now, yet they live on.

I don't doubt mainframes might be overpriced, but I also suspect the reason they persist is they have yet to come up with a cheaper option, offering the same performance figures.

One use of CICS was for heads down medical claims processing, across all four US time zones. The site our team from IBM Research visited wanted high reliability: If the site was down for, say, an hour, then the data entry staff would have to be called back on a Saturday, for at least half a day, at a higher rate per hour. One such outage in a year, and the CIO could lose his bonus. Two and he could lose his job. The site was very uptight. Getting into the glass house was not easy; might have been easier to get into the White House Oval Office.

At one time to make CICS more secure, there was some interest in having processor hardware support for address sub-spaces. Another idea was cross memory where a program could call and execute, say, a function in another address space. There were also data spaces, that is, address spaces with just data and no code but that could be accessed by other address spaces with code.

Net, the IBM mainframes are not really simple things. Cloning one would not be easy, and at IBM's next version of hard/software, the clone could be unable to run the newer software and suddenly be a boat anchor.

> At any rate, the mainframe is a hugely profitable business for IBM. Only around 4% of the firm’s revenues come from mainframe sales. But once additional hardware, storage, software and all kinds of related services have been factored in, the mainframe accounts for a quarter of IBM’s revenue and nearly half of profits, estimates Toni Sacconaghi of Berstein Research.

Read that again. HALF of profits. A QUARTER of revenue.

Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/09/ibms-mainf...

As I understand it, the big selling point of Big Iron has always been the idea that it's more stable at the hardware level than other kinds of computer. Is that actually true? If it is, can a company get similar uptime with non-Big Iron hardware? Because it seems like that would be a hard prerequisite for replacing those systems.