[tbrowbdidnso]

Can somebody tell me something cool IBM actually does for real besides run softlayer?

I'm so tired of endless waves of marketing bullshit with no substance. At least when most companies announce something it's a tangible product I can actually expect to use at a non ambiguous point in the future

[andwur]

Well there's Watson [1]. It obviously performed very well in Jeopardy! and it sounds like they had some novel ideas and techniques behind the implementation.

I'm not sure how cool this is anymore however. Our company was evaluating their Bluemix [2] cloud all-the-things-as-a-service service which offers Watson. Despite their very aggressive marketing team insisting it would be able to solve a very wide range of "machine learning problems" (their words, not mine) it fell down quickly when encountering problems outside their example data-set. It was also impossible to get in touch with an engineer there, the only people you could speak to were sales and/or marketing which were useless. I get the feeling their desired clientele are technically illiterate upper-management who merely want the guarantee of a massive corporation's support and to hell with their technical capabilities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer) [2] https://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/bluemix/

[rocgf]

That is because IBM is a huge corporation, with loads of red tape. As an engineer, you are not allowed to talk directly to customers without a certain training/certification. Even if their engineers had the time and would be willing to do it, they are not allowed to.

[apapli]

Genuine question - where do you consider softlayer to be "cool"? Or even relevant anymore - I always saw them as an "also ran" up against a big Azure and a much, much bigger AWS.

[seesomesense]

Softlayer is being IBMified into nonexistence:

"In the coming days, weeks, and months, you'll start seeing 'Bluemix' more and more where you're used to seeing 'SoftLayer'. Because the legacy SoftLayer offerings and legacy Bluemix offerings will be available from a unified cloud platform, we're bringing them all under the Bluemix brand," SoftLayer's digital content director Kevin Hazard said.

"IBM isn't planning on changing the substance of SoftLayer's systems, products, services, and support, but it will phase the name out as it moves everything, including the SoftLayer blog over to Bluemix domains.

[rocgf]

Softlayer did have certain things that AWS doesn't (like bare metal, completely configurable VMs etc.). However, SL was a steaming pile of crap. The interface was horrible and sluggish, you'd get errors like half the time you'd order a VM, you'd get loads of errors with running VMs and many more. I don't think SL was ever a good product.

[stonogo]

POWER is cool, even if it's probably going to die sometime in the next decade or so.

System i is cool, even if its a severely limited domain.

GPFS is really cool, even if it costs too much and isn't open source.

Cool is pretty easy to find at IBM. You just have to look where the executives aren't.

[bitmapbrother]

What part of running SoftLayer into the ground is cool?

[tbrowbdidnso]

Are they? This news saddens me greatly.

[pyromine]

Ever heard the phrase "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM"?

IBM is massive in IT consulting with basically half their revenue coming from the consulting side of their business, and the rest they're a service company in a lot of different IT verticals.

A somewhat informative quora link, because if you were too lazy to even google this you probably won't dig deeper than this: https://www.quora.com/What-does-IBM-do

[tbrowbdidnso]

Does that change anything I said? All this marketing doesn't seem to lead to anything tangible unlike similar releases from other big companies. It's just fluff.

I'm aware the IBM does consulting and that's possibly the most boring software realm there is.

[TuringNYC]

It might be boring, but it is revenue. Secondly, we should all be happy that companies like IBM (and of course Google, Facebook, Microsoft) are taking a long view and investing into cool ideas which may not necessarily immediately result in something tangible. The quarter-to-quarter view taken by most public companies is not optimal for society.

BTW, I work in ML+Medicine and IBM has dont great work in the area, with some Production implementations at hospitals.

[microtherion]

> Ever heard the phrase "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM"?

That's now "You won't know if anybody got fired for buying an IBM quantum computer until you look inside the box".