An impressive testimony from somebody working for IBM. I myself I worked with IBM in the past (many years ago) and I kind of felt the same.
Here is the post from Reddit:
I have been at IBM for a couple of years now and I honestly question why any of us are still here, pretending that this company is going to turn it around. Our best days are long gone and what we are witnessing is the slow, painful death of IBM yet we are still on this sinking ship.
IBM Cloud is an absolute joke. It accounts for an extremely tiny fraction of the market and only because most companies that use it are trapped with IBM’s legacy systems. They’re not using it because it’s good but because they have no choice. We bought Red Hat for $34 billion because we dropped the ball so hard on cloud. Why build innovative cloud solutions when we can just acquire something decent and slap our logo on it? Our hybrid cloud strategy is merging old systems with slightly newer systems. Most of our cloud revenue comes from services, consulting, and managing cloud infrastructure AKA getting paid to help other companies figure out our legacy technology.
This is mostly why Global Services is our biggest revenue stream. We basically sell the solution to problems that IBM products make. Our strategy is to sell complexity and eventually that company spirals into integration nightmares so they crawl back to IBM consultants to fix it.
IBM makes billions from just keeping system Z mainframes on life support because they are the backbone to so many major institutions. We can charge a ridiculous amount for software fees for enterprise software and they have no choice but to pay up in order to stay alive. The complexity and cost to move off these systems that have been built for decades is too high and we exploit that tremendously with insane maintenance fees.
This is exactly how our software licensing works too. We just lock companies into proprietary software hell for decades because our core software products like DB2 and Websphere have become deeply embedded in the infrastructure of large organizations. Companies are trapped when we charge high maintenance and support fees and they have to shell out for upgrades they barely need. ELAs are traps designed to squeeze as much money as we can possibly can.
We fail to integrate our acquisitions within our corporate strategy. We just have a mix of cloud platform extensions, AI solutions, and industry specific solutions. We are not innovating ourselves. This is more to help our consulting sales than it is to make a competitive product strategy.
watsonx is a desperate scramble to pretend that we are in the AI market. Everyone knows that we’re not coming up with anything innovative. We are just riding off the coattails of Meta and other open source models just like what we did with Red Hat. No one new will ever adopt watsonx. This is again targeted for our legacy customers who are trapped. It is all just mostly repackaged algorithms and models that everyone is already doing.
Our workforce rebalancing efforts aka our cost cutting strategy by offshoring and replacing highly-paid employees with lower-wage employees has ultimately damaged our long-term profitability. Employees feel less motivated and valued when we see our peers get laid off for cheap labor in India. Employee motivation, experience, and collaboration are crucial for overall productivity and long-term success, but we do it value any of that. It’s all for the short-term profit gains, which again will be overtaken by the long-term negative impact of declining productivity.
Our future is collapsing rapidly. We are holding onto legacy contracts and mainframe lifelines but once those clients migrate off, IBM is left with nothing but scraps. Microsoft, Google, AWS will destroy us as cloud AI leaders and eventually, they will also perfect mainframe-to-migration tools and our mainframe clients with jump ship. I envision we will be sold off as pieces or die all together.
So again, I ask: Why are you still here? IBM is draining your energy and trapping you in an endless cycle of bureaucracy, outdated tech, and corporate nonsense. Do you truly believe that watsonx or IBM Cloud will save us? There is no growth or innovation and you will either be patching up legacy systems, trying to sell dead AI products, or stuck in consulting purgatory. We are not turning it around. Get out while you can and develop skills in modern technology and work somewhere where the future is bright.
TLDR; IBM monetizes on confusion, legacy systems, and corporate inertia. We sell tech to trap companies in it, then charge them forever to keep it working. The only reason companies are with IBM is because the cost of leaving is higher than the cost of staying and we make billions just off that equation. There is no bright future.
Darth you have probably seen this made for TV movie but if not it is worth a watch. And I bet you would enjoy it.
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that moment Steve Ballmer come out of the framed scene is a classic
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yes, thats good one :-)
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oh yeah good one, hahahahaha
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144 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 1 Oct
I'm surprised it didn't die a long time ago. When the last company I worked for was acquired by them 10 years ago I was like, "They still exist? They have money to spend?"
It seems like a giant zombie company surviving off government contracts or surviving off other zombie companies that survive off government contracts.
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Honestly though, how much of the economy does that describe? Government spending accounts for something like 37% of GDP
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I had to admit that while I was writing that. 😢
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No bright future indeed and you see a lot of companies surviving on the name alone . There days are numbered if you aren’t bringing value you will be left behind eventually
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Such a shame. Classic case of innovate or die. Adapt or die
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Pretty much the same applies to Hewlett-Packard
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IBM started dying when they sold off their computer sector to lenovo. China now owns a lot. I remember you could drop an ibm thinkpad and it would just bounce. Pick it up and turn it back on.
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Didn't they bet big on quantum computing? They have the money to do it, so if this tech ends up paying off (no guarantee there, at all), they likely will be one of the big players, no? I would have to check though, I'm not sure how they compare to the likes of Google and other ones betting big on this holy graal.
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This reminded me of an article I read last week about the broader SaaS world and AI.
I currently work for a IBM subsidiarity btw. IMO companies like IBM never really die. I mean not really. The just cease to innovate and grow but fiat / cheap money and inertia keep them alive.
If you look at the stock price of IBM it could be doing much worse. Of course I know that's a fiat influenced game as well. The question I always ask is how many of these companies are actually profitable year over year.
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the employees are like anyone scared to change jobs , just trying to get what they can from the teets before the milk show dries up. probably a lot will be in denial too. ibm is probably in a state of managed decline, a bit like fiat world, just keeps sucking more, but most will go down with the ship
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Ancient technology
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It must be so demoralizing to work in that kind of business model.
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Apple took over their business
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USA is dying. China is taking over...reverse engineering the infrastructure of empire from Hong Kong to Silicon Valley.
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This is how big industries work, they destroy their workforce, thereby lowering the quality of the services they offer just to charge large amounts.
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