[johnwheeler]

A better question might be “what happened to IBM?” Most ascribe competition and cloud to their decline, and those are primary factors, but the main reason for their inability to effectively compete was an incompetent CEO.

If you ever heard Ginni Rometty speak at an interview or conference, it’s clear she was in way over her head. She had no real understanding of anything AI or cloud, only that she needed to have AI and cloud and a ready offering for any new buzzword: blockchain, quantum computing, etc.

Under her watch, IBM acquired a cast of companies and tried to assemble a cloud computing arm with little time to do it. While some of Watson’s core tech was born in house much was bolt on acquisitions and hodgepodge marketing to push the narrative of a cohesive whole. The developers gave it a chance, and it mostly sucked. It wasn’t aimed at them after all—-it was aimed at their managers.

[throwaway141592]

I was at IBM at the time when Ginni took over. While I'm sad that she didn't have what it took to save IBM, the seeds of IBM's downfall were sown over the preceding decade by her predecessor, Sam Palmisano. This Forbes article sums it up better than I could [0]. In brief, Mr Palmisano decided to focus his tenure on delivering unsustainable earnings-per-share numbers to investors, while ignoring existential threats to IBM's business from cloud computing and other advances in technology. He was handsomely rewarded for this focus. While Amazon built AWS, IBM bought back shares and squeezed cash cow business as hard as it could. The shareholders were happy with that, for a time.

Even at the point of Palmisano's departure in 2012, he had committed IBM to the infamous (for IBMers at least) Roadmap 2015, which promised that IBM's earnings-per-share would rise even higher by 2015. It left increasingly little money for arresting the decline in competitiveness of IBM's products. It is to Ginni's credit that she did eventually abandon Roadmap 2015, though not as soon as she should have done.

When Ginni took over, I remember feeling a sense of relief if anything and maybe a little renewed hope. IBM finally got its head out of the sand and started trying to compete again. The Watson badge that got slapped on anything vaguely related to big data, machine learning and analytics was one of those efforts. It's a shame that it didn't work but it was probably too late by the time Ginni took the job.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/05/30/why-ibm...

[908B64B197]

> Under her watch, IBM acquired a cast of companies and tried to assemble a cloud computing arm with little time to do it.

IBM's problem was that consulting and legacy products (think mainframes) are still making money and what the company is known for. These two products aren't attractive for the type of engineer you need to build a world class cloud. This, coupled with less than stellar compensation meant that the critical talent required simply went somewhere else.

What they should have done is invest in cloud computing startups, keep them separate entities and act as a sales channel for these products, for legacy customers only.