I certainly couldn’t. With this question I’m mostly addressing the long-timers that remember the “good old days”.
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IBM's long decline started in the late 1980's early 1990's. But it accelerated greatly in 2012, and this time does feel different. You can't really blame economic conditions in 2019. It's also getting late to be talking about the "shift to cloud" since AWS launched in 2006 Azure in 2010 and GCP in 2011. The RH acquisition feels more like a Hail Mary than a strategic plan.
I thought I was the only one who remembered the water cooler memo.... the entire company lost an entire summer just getting more and more furious about that memo and the sheer stupidity it showed. We saw for the first time how clueless Akers was, and it cost him his job. It also forever changed our attitude toward the company. We would never again blindly follow whoever sat in the big chair in Armonk. And every CEO since then has done more and more damage to the relationship and the company.
I go back to a different IBM - was with a Business Partner 1990-1992 when Akers ran the company almost into the ground. THAT was the IBM with power and it was fading even then. The infamous water-cooler memo circulating on PROFS. Yeah, that IBM. So nothing has changed between the Akers version and the Ginny version - just new technology that IBM is still lousy at.
others here hit the nail on the head. the company forgot about great products and forgot about delighting customers. what has happened, while disgusting, is the expected outcome. Heard T. Siebel on CNBC describing IBM as "an american treasure" but it wasn't looking too good for them these days. He's understating both points. Without IBM (research) much of what we enjoy today with technology wouldn't exist. However those days are long gone and most of what IBM invents is worthless and what is not is quickly ruined when its productized.
I know I am delusional, but I hope for IBM to emerge from its Dark ages began in the Era of Sam and accelerated in the current Era, under a new leader where it can return to at least a shadow of its former greatness. However, now the place is so over leveraged, the company is one poor business cycle away from bankruptcy.
@ZVYUp1G-1lql - It's not that there's anything wrong with "shareholder value" it's that the time horizon needs to be significantly longer than just the current quarter.
Two thoughts.
GE.
Roadkill 2015.
nuff said.
Yes, I have been at IBM since 1999 and as soon as Palmisano took over you could see things started to go south. Being at IBM these days is all about surviving, it has become a sport and people are very proud to tell how they survived yet another year!
@ 1lql Actually, IBM is bigger than Apple and Microsoft combined.
Oh, you mean profitable not headcount? ;-)
Maybe if they lay off 2/3 of their employees they will become the size and profitibility of Apple.
No ... and any Company considering to buy or maintain anything from IBM should see a shrink.
It's unbelievable but not without precedent...think Kodak. As soon as IBM made "shareholder value" their priority, with the inevitable financial engineering that's needed to maintain the illusion, they were doomed. If they'd simply maintained the original ethos of delighting their clients with world class products, they'd be bigger than either Apple and Microsoft today. And that includes the need to innovate and invest in internal R&D....not buying up companies and trying to integrate their products into a disorganised kludge of software known as the IBM Cloud.
yes - they stopped developing software years ago, brought companies and ran them into the ground.
name me a software product IBM produced that is world class in the last 10 years -- not brought.