[akaahduofjdr]

There's no fixing it because there isn't anything fundamentally broken , rather an aversion and active resistance to a process that is objectively bad in many respects, and largely the result of the massive waves of outsourcing that were promoted and allowed to happen by choice. This wasn't a law of nature or of logic , there are a lot of ways in which it is less than desirable.

I don't think there is a 2nd law of thermodynamics for social and economic processes, and I think that it is provably the case that specific decisions were made by specific people that allowed all of the things you described to happen, and that there are easily conceivable alternative paths we might have taken.

In some sense, IBM is idealistic in the true sense of the word. That ideology is certainly not HackerNews' ideology, but it is more complicated than the simple "capitalist company doing capitalist things" explanation.

[bane]

Great comment. IBM is as IBM wants to be. I don't think there's a mystery to it and they've ended up on an evolutionary path that can't be reversed.

To wit, I just watched a long form video [1] on the passion that goes into IBM mainframes including some interesting clips of various physical robustness tests of the assembled systems. It reminded me of watching clips from various space programs where a largely full-up untested rocket had to put humans into orbit without blowing up.

Another revolution that's occurred, but IBM chose not to really follow (asterisk) is the idea that you assume some percentage of your hardware will fail (instead of trying to make it never die) -- then you engineer around that. I'm not sure what will win in the end, but right now the entire industry is telling us to have failover into different availability zones in Amazon, or even across clouds -- one of which IBM offers.

1 - https://youtu.be/ouAG4vXFORc (asterisk) - IBM does sort of have an understanding of this of course, they have a cloud after all.

[ngcc_hk]

Recall the token ring not falling and error management way, compared with the Ethernet assume possibly failure. It is such a headache to manage token ring and sna network. At least sna is reliable. Token ring is actually no. Suprisng. But at least sna assume there might be issues in the other end. Not token ring. And that is the problem of assuming all problem is managed.

[dakial1]

Many say that IBM is a quarter-to-quarter company, but that wouldn't be true, as it still has some longe-term high-bet investments as the Quantum Computer. So not all is lost.