[joncrane]

Does anyone else remember the days when "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" was true? You might pay a little extra, but it was never a total fail to use IBM products.

I'm not sure when that changed, but I feel like these days, IBM is closer to Oracle than AWS.

[kev009]

I will copy my comment from the last thread on this project:

"IBM is a multifaceted company.

These kinds of projects fall under what used to be called IBM Global Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Global_Services. It could be compared somewhat to EDS (HP), Accenture, Perot Systems (Dell) etc. I've never heard of over-delivery from any of these kinds of outsourcing arrangements, they always seem so obviously destined for boondoggle.

IBM proper, the one that makes mainframes and POWER and DB2 and a ton of operating systems and storage etc is very much a technology company. Some of their best products have the worst sales and marketing efforts. I'm working directly with the senior leadership of the POWER group right now and there are no salesmen in sight.. the technology will either sell itself or not. When we met in person the first time the GM told me "we can build any kind of computer you want" - meaning microarchitecture changes, SERDES configuration, new board layout, sheet metal, OS, application tweaks. Not a lot of companies can do that. There is hubris, less technology, and lack of technical value at FANG or most startups or whatever your benchmark is in comparison.

IBM Research is one of the only remaining great industrial research organizations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Research. Their results speak for themselves."

[MrLeap]

IBM has been accumulating a persona among my cadre (developers who consult for companies that are bootstrapping a new tech division on top of a profitable business).

The problem is that having a boondoggle division reflects on the whole company. When I'm making decisions for a client, I never even think about what IBM solutions I could apply to a problem.

I've only had a few projects using IBM products, admittedly most very old legacy systems -- but those introductions failed at just basic dev hygiene things. Documentation behind paywalls, couldn't get things to run on my dev machine without very experimental projects made by individuals - last updated in 2003. Just frustrating. I don't like advocating complete rewrites, I've happily updated a company's internal tool that was written in as3. Could have squeezed more hours out of them if they wanted to go with html5, but doing so didn't open up any new possibilities they wanted so I didn't.

If your company is running on RPG, and it's just a CRUD app -- I'm going to save you money by recommending a rewrite under the two circumstances I've encountered in the wild.

Honestly, this isn't their fault. It's awesome that their products have lasted so long for companies. I don't expect a company to keep up to date documentation / interoperable interpreters for 30 year deprecated tech. IBM's just so old that they've accumulated many layers of fossilized products, and those things have caused an unfair bias in my mind (and probably the minds of others)

I'm sure that there are problems IBM research is uniquely qualified to solve, my perception is that they're the wrong choice for most problems. I'm pretty thankful for companies like them. (IBM, Siemens, SAS etc) Their expensive ERP systems have enabled me to raise my rate over the years off the information asynchrony that forms the foundation of their success.

[smacktoward]

I do, but it's important to remember that the saying "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" was not intended as a testament to the quality of IBM's work. It was intended as a testament to the irrelevance of the quality of IBM's work.

"No one ever got fired for buying IBM" because IBM was the safe, established choice. If you bought IBM and the project ended up failing, nobody would blame the failure on your decision, because buying IBM was what you were expected to do. If you bought from some other vendor and the project ended up failing, however, people would rush to claim that the failure was your fault for not doing the safe thing and buying IBM. In other words, you bought IBM to protect yourself from appearing to have taken a risk, not because you expected them to do a particularly good job.

If TFA is accurate, it would appear that "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" is as true today as it ever was. If the Canadian government had hired the Freshbooks guy to build their new payroll system, and the project had failed, the person who had made that decision would have had a whole lot of explaining to do. That person bought IBM, though, so everyone will just shrug their shoulders and assume the fault for the failure lies elsewhere.

[acomjean]

I worked there in the late 1990's. I was in research division (writing Notes applications) and they were doing better after the downturn in the early 90s. They spent billions on research (some hardware research like chips/ some software research). The little nub that think pads use was invented in that building. Global Services (the consulting arm) was the rising division.

The talk inside was the new CEO (Gerstner[1]) was leveraging IBM's size rather than the previous plan to break it into pieces and was somewhat successful at it.

I left to go back to grad school. And I think the new management went back to the "this is too big and unmanageable, its worth more broken up" mindset.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_V._Gerstner_Jr.

[chaoticmass]

Really good book about Gerstner's turnaround of IBM in the 90's:

https://www.amazon.com/IBM-Redux-Gerstner-Business-Turnaroun...

[tinymollusk]

I interpreted that remark as a commentary on humans preference for failing in a conventional manner being perfectly acceptable, versus possibly failing in an unconventional one.

(I also grew up professionally in the 2000s, well after IBM was widely considered elite by the tech nerd community.)

[eitland]

> Does anyone else remember the days when "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" was true? You might pay a little extra, but it was never a total fail to use IBM products.

I never though of it that way but rather as a CYA move.

[dredmorbius]

And an integral component of a FUD strategy.

Employed elsewhere (o hai msft) but originated, under that particular acronym, at IBM.

The cconcept itself can be traced back at least as far as Sun Tzu.

[cromulent]

I'm intrigued about the Sun Tzu history - could you expand a bit more?

[dredmorbius]

The doctrine is scattered throughout the work, and much of the expansion is in commentary, ancient & modern

But: "All warfare is based on deception."

https://suntzusaid.com/book/1/18

(And following, as below.)

Also on the use of spies.

More:

https://suntzusaid.com/book/11/36

https://suntzusaid.com/book/11/37

[mikro2nd]

> I'm not sure when that changed

Late 1980's. I was there, working for a skunkworks fragment in a Big Blue shoppe. To express doubt about IBM was to get no bonus. Then they started to haemorrhage cash to the tune of 5B$/quarter.

Really it's that Oracle is closer, these days, to what IBM was 30 years ago.

[scottLobster]

Clearly too many people remember. Shows the power of branding. IBM has largely moved out of the consumer space, and occasionally their research labs come out with some cool new tech (Watson and such). In the common consciousness they were the Apple of their day who then ascended out of the market to bigger, cooler things. As a result most people, including non-technical business execs who make purchasing decisions, don't have a good current frame of reference. IBM rode that facade for a while, it's only recently that their blunders have started hurting their reputation within the industry.

[blueside]

> some cool new tech (Watson and such)

I'm afraid Watson is very far from a "cool new tech", many companies have described their experience with Watson as a money gouging disaster.

[gargravarr]

Its appearance on Jeopardy! made it seem cool especially to non-technical people, who are most likely to remember and be impressed by it.

[mikro2nd]

> they were the Apple of their day

What day was that? Back in the 70's with the Selectric typewriters?

No, seriously, those were fucking fantastic machines!

[ksenzee]

My dad fixed those for a living. They really were great tech.

[pound]

I'd say Google of their day. Apple of those days would probably be Olivetti. As in Design/Lifestyle vs Computing power.

[tonyedgecombe]

IBM was never in the consumer space.

[vadimberman]

> I feel like these days, IBM is closer to Oracle than AWS

That's a compliment. IBM is by far more dysfunctional.

It changed in early 2000s, I believe.

[gargravarr]

IBM has sold off most of their divisions - hardware to Lenovo, storage to Hitachi, etc. They no longer actually produce anything. So 'buying' IBM is no longer a real concept - they're pure consultants now, and consultants never 'sell' a product, just help you implement someone else's. A lovely legal distinction that they seem all too happy to abuse.

[AlisdairO]

> They no longer actually produce anything

This is not true. IBM produces a ton of software (spanning a range from terrible to excellent, quality-wise). This is where much of their profit comes from now. They still produce a bunch of hardware, mostly at the higher (and legacy) end.

[gargravarr]

Okay, my bad.