All those IBM people high fiving in LinkedIn etc. Many of us knew "it would not stick". The emperor has no clothes and all next up CEO Smarmy Rob Thomas has is a closet full of sneakers and hoodies. IBM CEO. Hoodies and sneakers. 57 years of CEO leadership by Watson Sr and Jr and Thomas is next man up. That little white bag in the back of every plane seat comes to mind.
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And yet nobody voices the question. IBM has lost so many high performing people in the last 12 months and more have moved into roles where they cannot benefit the company fully because of new policies. What is being done to shore up ibm resource retention and growth?
$233 now.
The emperor has no clothes … describes Albany site perfectly
Why Whitehurst is stepping away from IBM: @OP+1bKwAb6h
Jim Whitehurst and Bridget van Kralingen are out in an IBM leadership shakeup: @OP+1bELGiJP
History of Jim Whitehurst: @OP+1bLidKmw
Why Whitehurst is stepping away from IBM: @hn+1k1kggwf6
Jim Whitehurst and Bridget van Kralingen are out in an IBM leadership shakeup: @OP+1bELGiJP
History of Jim Whitehurst: @OP+1bLidKmw
RH was AK's ticket to paradise.
AK took RH over "to restructure" didn't he? From there, he positioned himself for "big boss show"? Didn't want competition?
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
AK showed him the door
Why did Jim Whitehurst, former CEO of RedHat leave IBM? Any thoughts from RedHat people if he would have made a good CEO and leader?
When the board selected AK to be CEO, they told him: “If you wanna keep your high paying job, you better clean up that swamp and move jobs to India, otherwise…”
In other tech giants like Microsoft, Meta etc… at past 50 years old or few years less, you are automatically replaced; and cannot coast your entire career, you would at IBM
You meant what should, not what is as sales strategy and I agree.
Won't happen due to how it's all structured, can't pivot to what you say and limit future sales.
Well, consulting is flat so either way Q2 ain't good then.
"IMHO, you are partly right. I say this because those same IBM board members (and they are mostly aging dinosaurs"
I don't disagree about the dinosaurs comment: These people install themselves in there with lots of glue so they are stuck in there. But in other places, just not IBM it did work many times (people that were there long, that is), IBM has the wrong dinosaurs. Many tech execs AK's age can run around him in circles.
But I'm very happy to be wrong...
"It’s not about talent but about costs"
I agree, but whether he was told or he came to do it intentionally or not is irrelevant, it is actually all he can do anyway (no gray material for anything else).
As for Ginni, I may have been too optimistic that somehow it would work?
I still hope and pray that things change.... and soon.
Thank you for a good discussion.
As absolutely terrible as GR and AK have been, I have no doubt that RT will be way worse. He doesn't have a leadership bone in his body.
I was referring to future sales strategy, needs to eventually sell like software, othwrwise it's not sustainable. Bur I can be wrong, and if I am, it's fine.
@d2 Growth trajectory for AI is not dependent on SW sales. 90% of the Generative AI number they report is Consulting. And 90% of that is just regular work tagged AI, somebody used ChatGPT to write a client email on SAP project? GenAI!!!!!!!!!!!!!
IMHO, you are partly right. I say this because those same IBM board members (and they are mostly aging dinosaurs if you read their bios in the IBM annual report - they masquerade as experienced executives and managers, BUT they are still dinosaurs) and Wall Street and pension fund investors will be showing Alvind the door double quick (he is a peon employee too), as the stock price drops back to where it started. After all cutting costs can only take you so far and in the final analysis, it's all about business - it's been great knowing you, and don't let the door hit you on the way out. It's the hypocrisy that one expects of the vulture capitalist culture. Nobody is indispensable. If I got that wrong, please correct me.
It’s not about talent but about costs; the board selected AK because they needed Indian without feelings to cleanup the house, and because they needed a CEO to outsource jobs to India and low cost areas in order to cut costs and clean up the house from aging dinosaurs ; the board and the investors (mutual/pension funds) only cares about the stock performance. They could care less about the peon employees
Adding, yeah, Red Hat, yada, yada, still he wasn't the man to get the top job.
I hear you.
My humble two cents.
1) Arvind is worse than Ginni.
2) Ginni came from Strategy, what she lacked was exectuion, she needed support to get her vision delivered, but the team behind her wasn't there. One of them being Arvind, so that's why I can't undersrsannd how and why he was promoted. I watched the press conference the other day (JFK Jr and Dr Oz on Healh Tech) and thought, bummer, this could have been IBM... I believe that IBM messed up with Ginni's succession plan.
3) Arvind has neither qualities, meaning, no strategy, no execution). He's deeply boring. Makes IBM look not exciting. It's a drag.
All the hate for Ginni. I get it. But I had a career when Ginni was here. A future. Now every day feels like my last. Who cares about the stock price when your future looks dismal? And too old to find another job - ageism is an American tradition.
Personally, I found Watson Health to be absolutely a genius concept. The problem is that IBM has no appetite for true investment. If something doesn't pay off right away, they bail. The fact we sold Watson Health rather than try to fix it tells you all you need to know about Arvind's big AI push. It's a sham. We were never a true AI company not if we were dumping one of the most potential lucrative markets for AI in the future while trying to enter AI as a market. It makes no sense and we had no real plan other than to jump on ChatGPT's coattails.
You think Apple gets everything right the first time? They fail a lot; they just don't brag about it. They also don't try to turn a profit before the product is ready. AI in health is going to be a game changer and once again, IBM chickens out before realizing any of the return on investment. That's a failure of leadership - Ginni then Arvind.
Yes!
1) Whether IBM really learned the "Ginni lesson" remains to be seen (keeping a CEO that is not performing for far too long), Ginni almost 9 years, Arvind almost 5 1/2 years. 14-15 years all-in-all. That's a lot of time wasted. But, what's the plan?
2) Agree 100%, Q3 will not be good (the numbers and actions are just not there), Hopefully, there is a plan behind the scenes.
3) Also, Arvind is just not inspiring. When he talks, it's like watching paint dry.
4) Question, are insiders like Ginni and Arcind the right choice moving forward?
@d2 I remember that Alvind was encouraging many employees to buy IBM stock when he first came in. He was pumping it once he got the CEO job and used every meeting on w3 to tell employees that he had a vision to take the stock to $300. It was a bold and brash prediction in the days when the stock was languishing at around $150 for years. Ginny Rometty was the fraud and incompetent CEO that no one inside IBM spoke against but she should have been fired at least 5 years prior to her date of departure. She was a total disaster, especially with the Watson Healthcare debacle. Who puts their incompetent relative to run a division that is failing and incurring bigger losses every quarter ? Ginny did. And who insisted that she produced great results for IBM and needed more time as CEO, even when the results of every quarter spoke of abject failure and more layoffs ? Ginny did. Why Alvind even pushed her garbage autobiography book on the IBM intranet is a total mystery.
Well, Alvind was successful upto a point, but the IBM stock price has never reached $300. All good things come to an end, don't they (bad things do the same thing also) ? At some point reality catches up, you miss your mark and you fall back to earth with a different and steeper trajectory than the one you took to go up. It could be happening now. Alvind can forget his bonus if things get worse in Q3 2025 (as I suspect they will). I wonder what Jim Cramer is going to say about all this, since has been pushing the IBM stock over the past few weeks. I suspect he will just shrug his shoulders, button his lips and move on to the next rising star in the stable. You win a few, you lose a few.
And as they say, life goes on.
Arvind's Family and Friends outsourcing ain't helping him.
To be fair, the stock of MANY tech companies has been inflated – AND it still is even with the latest market corrections, we are here for a longer ride. It was going to happen eventually, but the fake bonanza would have lasted just a bit longer. The correction happened earlier as a result of other reasons, which forced the harsh reality to come out of the shadow.
In January 2020, the month of the Arvind announcement, the closing price was $107.46 (January 31, 2020). Did he create enough value in 5+ years to get to where it was in June 2025 (close to $300)? Nope.
The market saw initially momentum building up for IBM based on 1Q 25 results, but 2Q 2025 earnings (July 23) were a different story when looking deeper. Software down, flat consulting revenue, increased expenses and interest burden. Growth trajectory for AI and hybrid cloud is heavily reliant on software sales. Slowing organic software revenue growth are a weakness. Arvind also goes and talks about “geopolitical tensions are prompting a few clients to move cautiously." Speaking of putting more salt to the wound...
The dude has been CEO for more than 5 years (let's include his prep time since his announcement as incoming CEO, because he had several months to prep and he’s also an insider).
What can he pull off to stay for a bit longer? TBH, dunno…
Perspective people. On 1/1/2024 IBM stock closed at $159. Absolutely nothing in the following 18 months justified the runup to $296. Just a bunch of empty promises about AI and Quantum that will never happen. It's headed right back to that level.