Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

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So yeah, the move to the cloud is hurting IBM's traditional core business. But as to the criticism of the current CEO for "doing nothing", the partnership she just inked with Apple seems like a step in the right direction. It's exactly the thing they should be doing to adapt themselves to the cloud era.

Look at this stuff. It's fucking beautiful: https://www.apple.com/business/mobile-enterprise-apps/

Enterprises don't need as much help setting up and running their disappearing data centers. But they do still need help building better software for their business. And more than ever before there's a focus on the ROI of better designed software. Definitely most enterprises don't have that kind of software expertise in house.

I think it would be mistake to advise IBM to try to just focus on competing with Amazon. The margin in enterprise services has moved up the stack and that's where it looks like IBM is moving. Definitely some pain along the way though.

Not that beauty is a bad thing, per se, but it's never been high on the list of requirements for enterprise software. Functionality and configurability tend to be more important.

Things are changing; people see no reason to put up with shitty design and hard to use applications in-house, especially if their employer has nice customer-facing applications. It's analogous to the PC revolution, when people started using their own copy of VisiCalc or Lotus.

> Things are changing; people see no reason to put up with shitty design and hard to use applications in-house, especially if their employer has nice customer-facing applications. It's analogous to the PC revolution, when people started using their own copy of VisiCalc or Lotus.

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

When the CO or GM level staff start using their personal iPads because they hate battling with their XP-era laptops so much*, change happens.

I'm seeing an increasing trend in business users having budget and spending it without it anywhere in the conversation. Especially with the rise of SaaS where the cost is easily buried on an expense report...

I expected this comment.. When I say "beautiful" I'm not just referring to the aesthetics. I'm referring to the user experience design. Good UX helps users be more successful -- we've seen it happen in the personal computing space over the past decade -- and that translates into ROI. That's the theory, at least, that a lot more enterprises are coming around to.

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