@by
Oh, people were held accountable just not the people who actually deserved it. The usual favorites were handpicked to lead this supposedly triumphant endeavor, and Albany IBM finally had something it could call a real customer sort after decades of trying. I distinctly remember Jon K repeatedly boasting on multiple occasions that Rapidus came to IBM because “we’re the best at this.” As the article makes painfully clear, that was hardly the case. Rapidus came to us because we were effectively their only option and probably the cheapest. Well, you get what you pay for.
The deal was fundamentally flawed from the outset. The business case, technical capabilities, supply chain, and logistics barely made sense on paper, let alone in practice. Plenty of people could see the problems coming. Rapidus apparently didn’t, and when reality finally caught up with the sales pitch, they felt misled. Frankly, they had every right to.
Remember the big prototyping push from two years ago? Whatever happened to that grand initiative? Where is the guy who was supposedly leading it a year later? Another big endeavor, another round of self-congratulation, and then silence. It went absolutely no where. Albany simply isn’t equipped to execute these kinds of ventures at the scale and complexity being promised. But admitting that would require an honest assessment of the site’s limitations, and IBM’s leadership seems far more comfortable pretending those limitations don’t exist.
The RIE leadership absolutely botched this one. This wasn’t some unforeseeable technical mishap; it was a predictable failure of judgment, strategy, and execution. The people responsible should have been held accountable, starting with the leaders who sold the vision, approved the approach, and insisted on treating optimism as a substitute for operational reality.
Instead, the usual playbook prevailed: protect the favored few, shuffle the leadership deck, and move the responsible parties safely out of the line of fire. The people who actually had to live with the consequences were left holding the bag.
That is the real IBM failure here. Not just that the Rapidus endeavor went sideways, but that a leadership culture capable of engineering such a preventable disaster can still engineer its own escape from accountability.