Thread regarding IBM layoffs

Agreed. This is sales. It has been going on for centuries. At some point though you need to build trust with your customer to get repeat business. It does not matter whether you are selling use cars or software, hardware, or services.

AI is just replacing commodity labor which for the most part is already off shored to India and other low cost countries. It’s a savings, but not a BIG savings. IBM’s true costs lie in its exceedingly high overhead driven primarily by excessive management and non-productive staff. AK it’s time to put your CEO pants on, and start making the hard decisions. Excessive overhead at IBM is driving 3-4 billion in excessive costs. Swing the ax and demand 1/3 of managers and non customer facing employees must go. (Yes you can exempt certain departments as they never meet customers as part of their IBM job assignments. It would show a serious commitment to streamlining where “favorites” can’t be saved by their godfathers.

You should get out of sales then

Once upon a time it was under promise and over deliver.
IBM figured out that the staff will lie to customers with no issues T the new mantra of over promise and under deliver took over.
If you hate selling broken promises but are still here you only have to look in the mirror to find the problem.

Who ever said the human race is composed of honest people?

LMFAO. "The broken promises should gradually fade as IBM reaches a sustainable smaller size. Where that will be, depends on how well IBM executes its new strategy."

Yep, for me: 17 years in SWG Tech Sales (a few years ago), and I see that there are things in IBM that never (and will never) change…

I can relate. Spent over two decades working in technical sales at IBM. More times than not the client teams and sales reps oversold our solutions and I was often involved in escalated customer situations. Not saying that this does not happen at other IT vendors though since I saw the same overselling when I worked fives years at another major IT vendor.

There is an old saying in sales which says “you have to sell what’s on the truck now, and worry about tomorrow tomorrow” You can net that out to “IBM is transitioning”. Some products will survive and be improved, and some products will be sold or abandoned. Given IBM’s strategy of hybrid cloud/AI/SW modernization/enterprise, I suspect mainframe product sets will survive and be improved, and other “smaller” products sets will go the way of the dodo. That’s not to say smaller product sets aren’t good, but it does say IBM doesn’t have the broad resources it used to have, so can’t invest in them going forward. It’s the nature of a shrinking company. Some product sets have to go as IBM shrinks. The pecking order is most likely Small Power product sets, followed by commodity Intel product sets, followed by enterprise Power product sets, and finally the Crown Jewels of Enterprise Mainframe product sets. The broken promises should gradually fade as IBM reaches a sustainable smaller size. Where that will be, depends on how well IBM executes its new strategy.