[the906]

I work for IBM's new design group and honestly I'm pretty optimistic about the future of the company (and I'm a generally a pretty big pessimist/realist). Aspects of the company have issues but many of those are being fixed/changed.

[coldcode]

I think IBM is big enough to be both incredibly stupid and smart at the same time, depending on where you look.

[fat0wl]

Yep. I work at a big company that uses WebSphere products & they're pretty rock solid.

My only issue is a personal one (that I more like to pick and choose my own stack) so there are free technologies more amenable to that. But as far as creating a suite of business applications is concerned -- biggest problem I see is developers not knowing how to control WebSphere (auto-deploy, auto re-admin) which seems to be cultural rather than an issue with the software.

And FYI to all those complaining about the "send a jar to IBM?!!" scenario you should realize that sending around WARs/EARs is pretty commonplace in the java world. it's kindof like zipping a certain git commit, for all you dynamic folks. I agree it would be nice to have something simpler but corps are not in the habit of sharing their repos with each other and creating WARs/EARs/JARs is trivial. Every project has a build script for this already in daily use.... But our stuff is onsite luckily, i have no experience with outsourcing infrastructure to them.

[miweiss]

From my limited experience working at IBM (7 years ago I interned for a little over a year), I think you're right. A lot of what the author writes is absolutely true, but I think he underestimates the power of a few good teams to lift the company out of something like this.