[fat0wl]

this may be true. I use a lot of IBM server/development techs & pretty much all of them are missing the magic they claim, boiling down to "confusing forced development paradigm that bleeds millions from your company in infrastructure and niche developer costs" (Web Experience Factory, Coremetrics, Portal etc.). None of the out-of-the-box-everything-integrates-seamlessly aspect is there, despite that being the whole basis for these monstrous sales prices. In short, many of their products have laughably little value and even non-technical corporate management is realizing this.

(You can tell a lot of the software is sold with IBM thinking "We'll tell them its their fault for a couple of years unless they hire a few of our consultants, then if they realize the product actually sucks hopefully we will have an upgrade ready by then.")

However, whenever I see articles from that Cringely dude (the one referenced repeatedly in this summary) I have to think "eh, maybe.... I'll believe it when I see it". He is pretty much an anti-IBM conspiracy theorist from what I can tell, though of course they are a strange enough organization that a lot of what he says turns out to be true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_X._Cringely

http://www.cringely.com/

[aragot]

I've worked with IBM ClearQuest and IBM FileNet and I concurr, those products are retarded bloats of off-market junk. The free golf courses in Orlando are nice, though, so I've renewed the purchase for two more years.

[stuff4ben]

Yup. Message Broker wasn't all that bad, but the all-expenses paid trip to Vegas for a week was better.

[fat0wl]

hah i am jealous of you both... i don't get the kickbacks, i just get one more team of consultants that i have to work with on every project who relish the tiny bit of authority they have now been granted (Message Broker team thinks they're hot shit cuz they are a bottleneck on every project & we can't revise our service interfaces without their permission).

Funny thing is, all the consultants who specialize in these products are awful pseudo-programmers & I end up bypassing their techs (WMB, BPM, etc.) with pure Java solutions whenever possible since the overhead of speaking to them creates like a 10x productivity loss. If the nosy busybodies (awful below average pseudo-programmers within our own group) didn't tattle to mgmt to help them reign us back in, the whole company would be none-the-wiser & we'd get work done at breakneck speed... ALL MOST OF US NEED IS A GODDAMN SPRING OR EE CONTAINER + THE JVM, hah.

[stuff4ben]

I know the feeling, but that's how IBM makes their money. We have some great negotiators in our company and as a developer, I was given the Vegas trip. I'm an influential developer, but still just a lowly developer none the less. It didn't work for them though.