Something I find myself doing when I stumble through the saloon doors of a Hacker News link only to be met by a silent corporate stare, is to imagine real humans doing real human things. Like drinking their coffee, finishing their milk soup with marshmallows, and seeing their kids off to school.
They each get in their car, fasten their seatbelt, and back out of their storage bay onto the road. They tune their radio to a morning zoo being visited by a reeling ninth caller who didn’t win the free party pack.
They depart the trunk line and park in a fragmented matrix of similarly unique cars, de-safety their belt, rummage the console for an identity token, and head into their own morning zoo, paned wall-to-wall with one-way glass, seemingly installed backwards.
The humans shed the remaining vestiges of their real human mornings and dutifully touch base on how to liven up their portable document that contentfully explores, ”how can technology further deliver value to our audience?” perhaps using hypertext, while drinking more coffee.
Anyways… If you haven’t clicked “client value” at the top-right, I strongly encourage doing so. Ten points and a free party pack if you can read the entire thing with a straight face.
It seems to be describing a series of high-end sales calls, in the form of a management consulting engagement, with the question of, "How can I send IBM more business, and can you help me make slide decks to pitch this idea internally?"
That's not necessarily bad. You could do a lot worse on vendors or consultants.
(And what's the saying? "Nobody ever got fired for hitching their wagon to an IBM sales team.")
The only place where they seem to have anything novel and done a ton of research is quantum computing. But even then I have zero idea where they fit into all the competition in that space, whether or not it all just smoke and mirrors or what the enterprise use cases will be. I’ve worked there twice and this “Atlas” is very very on brand.
IBM would come off so much better if they just stuck to the one thing they still do really well. Investors can be taken on high impact tours of the physical facilities that have been purpose built around IBM's hardware if they need any convincing of the value proposition into 2030.
The AI and quantum roadmaps are an albatross for a company like this. They'll always come up in 2nd place or worse. The competition is insane. Meanwhile, there are maybe 3 other humans on earth with the means and conviction to build a competitor to their mainframe business today. It's one of the better moats in technology. It's not the biggest or most lucrative one, but no one wants to touch it because the captive audience would never risk an alternative.
Data is still IBM's best hope. It's always what they've done well. Especially the very important "core" data of complex enterprises. Things like the account balances and transactions for all customers at a bank. DB2 is easily the most compelling mainframe service and I don't ever see that changing.
If you gradually give up on engineering design and manufacturing, then all that's left is catching trends and convincing investors that you will succeed in the race to the next big thing.
I thought this would be like a history of their products from the punch card machines up through now, and I was very curious. When I saw that it's about their modern corpo slop services, I instantly clicked off. Sad!
Can we agree that in the age of LLMs, their client value content is a good indicator of under performance, at least from their content team? I mean, this entire doc can just be prompted into existence in 30 seconds, has no substance whatsoever.
IBM in the past has seemed more interested in maximizing the value of their current technologies than trying to predict and guide future technologies.
For example:
1. They missed the move to Cloud and eventually shifted focus to "hybrid" cloud, which allowed them to keep selling their existed software and hardware.
2. They missed the move to SaaS, trying instead to sell expensive on-prem enterprise software like Notes and Commerce, both of which they eventually sold to HCL.
3. Even though they were pioneers in virtualization, they were more interested in bundling their software on expensive appliances than enabling it to run in VMs.
The one thing they can predict is when something is on the verge of commoditization, at which point they decide it's too difficult to make money on and sell it off, e.g. PCs, laptops, hard drives, POS systems.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 51.8 ms ] threadAlso all this "vision 2030" stuff are getting too over the top.
They each get in their car, fasten their seatbelt, and back out of their storage bay onto the road. They tune their radio to a morning zoo being visited by a reeling ninth caller who didn’t win the free party pack.
They depart the trunk line and park in a fragmented matrix of similarly unique cars, de-safety their belt, rummage the console for an identity token, and head into their own morning zoo, paned wall-to-wall with one-way glass, seemingly installed backwards.
The humans shed the remaining vestiges of their real human mornings and dutifully touch base on how to liven up their portable document that contentfully explores, ”how can technology further deliver value to our audience?” perhaps using hypertext, while drinking more coffee.
Anyways… If you haven’t clicked “client value” at the top-right, I strongly encourage doing so. Ten points and a free party pack if you can read the entire thing with a straight face.
Its not that someone writes that sort of stuff, its that it people read and think "yeah! give me some of that!" that makes me worry for humanity.
It seems to be describing a series of high-end sales calls, in the form of a management consulting engagement, with the question of, "How can I send IBM more business, and can you help me make slide decks to pitch this idea internally?"
That's not necessarily bad. You could do a lot worse on vendors or consultants.
(And what's the saying? "Nobody ever got fired for hitching their wagon to an IBM sales team.")
Poor quality garbage being pushed to CEOs by marketing types.
The AI and quantum roadmaps are an albatross for a company like this. They'll always come up in 2nd place or worse. The competition is insane. Meanwhile, there are maybe 3 other humans on earth with the means and conviction to build a competitor to their mainframe business today. It's one of the better moats in technology. It's not the biggest or most lucrative one, but no one wants to touch it because the captive audience would never risk an alternative.
Data is still IBM's best hope. It's always what they've done well. Especially the very important "core" data of complex enterprises. Things like the account balances and transactions for all customers at a bank. DB2 is easily the most compelling mainframe service and I don't ever see that changing.
In addition to that, the products internally developed like AskHR are awful obstacle courses one has to scramble through to reach a human.
>>
2024: Scale generative AI–infused workloads across the multi-cloud.
2025: Evolve the hybrid cloud for generative AI.
2027: Deliver an open platform for sovereign AI.
2029: Realize the convergence of bits, neurons, and qubits.
2030: Enable one seamless compute.
2024: Scale bacon-infused omelet making across multi-pan
2025: Evolve hybrid cooking for generative food
2027: Deliver an open platform for sovereign food making
2029: Realize the convergence of omelets, burritos, and hash browns
2030: Enable one seamless breakfast food
That is where they ended on the AI track.
I think that's very prudent. No sense alarming prospective customers with the stages that follow on from there.
If there are questions, just say "singularity" and smile!
For example:
1. They missed the move to Cloud and eventually shifted focus to "hybrid" cloud, which allowed them to keep selling their existed software and hardware.
2. They missed the move to SaaS, trying instead to sell expensive on-prem enterprise software like Notes and Commerce, both of which they eventually sold to HCL.
3. Even though they were pioneers in virtualization, they were more interested in bundling their software on expensive appliances than enabling it to run in VMs.
The one thing they can predict is when something is on the verge of commoditization, at which point they decide it's too difficult to make money on and sell it off, e.g. PCs, laptops, hard drives, POS systems.