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by justboxing
2986 days ago
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IBM has stopped innovating a long time ago, I would guess sometime in the late 1980s IBM is also the biggest Patent Troll on the planet[1]. I met a Patent and IP Lawyer at a Code Camp in San Luis Obispo. He said he did Legal Patent and Licensing work for IBM for many years and claimed that they generated over 1 Billion $ / year just from their Licensing deals and patent enforcement alone, and that it was their biggest source of income.
I tried to see if those # in his claim were true, and it looks like they are, even to this day. > Between 2008 and 2012 IBM’s patent portfolio generated between $1.1 and $1.2 billion per year. Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2016/01/19/if-patent... [1] Source: https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs... |
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Turns out, again, that management had zero plans for innovation. Instead, they only had the standard MBA plans : we're going to get a cheaper, MUCH worse, workforce. No more decisions to make for management, so they don't have to take the risk of being wrong anymore.
Innovation ... died. Bill Gates became the richest man in the world taking one of their more obvious opportunities. But managers looked good to other managers, you know, in ways they were taught in their MBA education, and only in those ways. IBM ... withered and died, in the opinion of a lot of people. IBM watson, their poster child for innovation, is not even a bad joke in the AI research community. It's actually unknown. It's an empty shell.
Today, even the financial community is saying stuff like IBM is like McDonalds ... it's a real estate play (you're essentially betting on their ability to sell-and-lease-back their real-estate portfolio and pay out the short term profits from that to their shareholders). There is much justification for that in their financial reports.
It's a bit wider than that: they own some things, and they're rent-seekers, who are to deep in debt and are finding they have to sell ever more income-generating assets. Every product they have, even the ones with deep market lock-in is declining fast.