With all the money that IBM spends on R&D and the thousands of patents awarded, where are the game changing products?
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I wanted to take a Fellow (from Austin) to a retailer that was considering virtualizing the instore server... this was long ago and only Walmart had started in that direction
I thought with our years of mainframe virtualization, we were the best company to be able to compare the virtualization options at the time (there was VMware and at least two others being considered)
I was hoping to show the value of out technical depth and expertise, even beyond IBM products to open and competitor. After all, isnt that what DEs and Fellows were for?
When the Fellow, out of Austin, realized the retailer was considering replacing the p series servers, he did not want to get tagged with being a party to a loss. He declined the opp. I was glad he did
for the company size its really doesn't innovate that much. just buys ideas
You guys are all forgetting about BLOCKCHAIN!
For a long time, the IBM executive class was educationally inbred...Ivy League MBAs only, no other schools allowed. This fostered an obvious sense of community in the executive class, but it stunted its growth because of the lack of fresh ideas.
It may just be that like advanced cancer, the patient is too far gone to be saved. Better R+D, new products, etc...they won't matter. Why not? Because as Blake so eloquently stated in Glengarry Glen Ross, "a loser is a loser".
I wouldn't place IBM's lack of innovation at the feet of our STSMs and DEs. Still lots of terrifically talented people around, but getting thinned out like the rest.
The big issue is that IBM execs are totally without vision, absolutely allergic to innovation. Without an exec, nothing moves forward; with an exec, nothing moves forward either as they are narrowly focused only on their personal bottom line, their OKRs. 90% of what they do is pure politics and wouldn't know a great idea if it bit their fat a-s.
IBM execs - they are where good ideas go to die.
@xuv+1rAXCC1E I was with IBM in the departments (I won't say which department or position) where "cloud technology" (or at least IBM's vision of it) was conceived and first developed. If you could imagine cloud computing as a series of 10 steps, the first being "the masses want computing services" and the tenth being "the masses get computing services", then you could say that IBM missed out on steps 3-10, and the competitors then accomplished what IBM failed to do.
You name the area, and you'll find some place where IBM failed. VMware and others brought virtualization to the Intel environment...IBM engineers and scientists said it was impossible. Microsoft and Citrix were creating virtualized Windows environments for years, both virtual servers and virtual desktops. IBM could have taken advantage of this, but didn't. Amazon had the vision to take racks of cheap and disposable servers and put up a website front-end to give customers the ability to configure and deploy their own virtual machines, with no manual assistance required. VMware made it feasible for administrators to hot-swap VMs between physical servers, no intervention or shutdown required. How cool was that?
In the meantime, IBM's efforts amounted to putting up a website where customers could request a server of some kind, and the request would be routed to administrators in India or someplace like that for manual setup and deployment...put a physical server in a colo cage, install an OS on it, configure and test it etc. All the waiting one would expect with human labor, but without any of the benefits of local staff. Who would want that?
And for that...IBM threw up lots of STSMs, DEs, and even IBM Fellows (!) showing Powerpoint slides in customer presentations, displaying "IBM e-Business On Demand". Yeah, some cloud vision there.
I wish I could say that it could have turned out differently, but I don't think it would have. IBM's directions were set at the time in both marketing and technology, and I don't think anything that any one individual did would have made any difference. Cloud technology was never going to be developed by IBM, nor would they have capitalized on it had they actually developed it.
It was sort of mentioned earlier but it can be expanded: Watson Code Assistant For Z. What a steaming pile that is! There is maybe one COBOL program in the world that it can translate to Java. And that program is about 20 lines long. This "product" can only be described as a disaster.
Their semiconductor group seems impressive going to all these lower nodes
@vrj+1rAXCC1E some of the flash storage technology IBM makes and sells is pretty neat - some genuine cool kit there. But yeah, I agree with the general thrust of your point.
Compared to other tech firms, IBM's R&D spend is pretty low. Combine that with disfunctional executive interference and lower wages compared to other firms, and you get your results.
@vrj, Challenge accepted .. the top 2 supercomputers in 2019 in the world were IBM delivered …
IBM revenue is about $60 Billions per year. It comes from products and services.
True, IBM has been shrinking for the last 30 years, very few breakthroughs. The quality of the technical leads (STSM, DE, …) have been declining.
Today’s leads (STSM, DE, …) are very proficient making colored charts and spewing nonsense.
That is not 100% true, there were many innovations in hardware and software that kept the company afloat. On the other hand, money was poured into solutions that did not deliver, such as the cloud.
Both, IBM and Microsoft started developing the cloud solution at the same time, IBM technical leads were completely incompetent, and the results prove it.
folks file patents for all sorts of reasons
it doesn't mean they have to be useful or terribly creative
Watson!!! Oh wait, scratch that - I mean "Watsonx"
tape storage
That's certainly true!! It's been that way for over 20 years. I challenge anyone to name one thing ... just one thing ... that R&D came up with in the last 20 years that ever became a commercial success.