[mattdlondon]

I was previously an IBMer (not US based) until I left a couple of years ago, and I know someone very close to me who has just been offered redundancy from IBM (also not US based).

I appreciate the company's responsibilities are to the shareholders, but their approach seems to be short-sighted.

The culture in IBM seems to be if you are a sales person or a project manager you are the well-treated elite, and anyone else (i.e. the researchers, the developers, designers, consultants - basically anyone who actually makes anything that IBM sells) can go fuck themselves and are treated as dispensable/replaceable assets.

They're painting themselves into a corner - there are only a limited number of times you can get rid of the people on the ground actually doing anything before it really starts to hurt.

I think they've realised this and that is why they are now just buying companies rather than creating their own offerings.

Is it too late? Probably - they are only just getting their act together with cloud offerings whilst a bookshop has become a market leader. I dont think they can catch up.

[moonlighter]

Ex IBMer here. They're not cutting the fat anymore, simply because there isn't much fat left to cut. It's mostly cutting into muscle and bone these days.

Spot on regarding their cloud offerings. The thing is, just owning Softlayer and Cloudant etc. doesn't magically make then a compelling player in that space. While they do have mindshare in corporate IT, they have less so with developers and hackers on the bleeding edge, and even less so in the startup scene. If you think "Database in the cloud" for example.. what comes to mind. DB2? Informix? Nope. More like DynamoDB, Redis, MongoDB, CouchBase and the like.

IBMers doing competitive analysis attending Amazon's re:Invent 2013 conference must've been virtually shitting their pants during every keynote speech.

[jedmeyers]

>> They are only just getting their act together with cloud offerings whilst a bookshop has become a market leader.

Nice one. I can say similar things about SAP.

Interesting, possibly related fact - SAP was started by former IBM employees.

[derefr]

> The culture in IBM seems to be if you are a sales person or a project manager you are the well-treated elite, and anyone else (i.e. the researchers, the developers, designers, consultants - basically anyone who actually makes anything that IBM sells) can go fuck themselves and are treated as dispensable/replaceable assets.

That's a somewhat-sensible philosophy for a services company/consultancy (whose brand-name is its biggest asset) to take, though, isn't it? The only people IBM has to keep, to keep the lights on, are the salespeople (who introduce new customers) and project managers (who liase with current customers.) Everyone else is a black box that customers won't notice the replacement of. They could outsource everything but those people to subcontracting firms, and "IBM the services company" would persist.

[jedmeyers]

If the company does not care about the quality of those services then I guess they can do that. How long will the brand stay after that is a another question. I would not bet for long.