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And yet I'd bet a lot of money that innovating again was a large part of the reason IBM management justified to itself and shareholders these layoffs. 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. |