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Fable: IBM’s Oddities
A lot of people have wondered how IBM, with all its technological excelkence, could have let AWS wipe the floor with them in cloud services.
A lot of people have wondered how IBM, with all its technological excelkence, could have let AWS wipe the floor with them in cloud services.
However a famous IBM CEO noticed a similar lack of capability in what would have been expected to be an IBM proficiency.
“When I’d arrived at IBM, I wasn’t taking too much for granted, but I did expect I’d find the best internal IT systems in the world,” said the CEO, “ this might have been my greatest shock. We were spending $4 billion a year on this line item alone, yet we didn’t have the basic information we needed to run our business. The systems were antiquated and didn’t communicate with one another.”
The CEO went on to deliver a remarkable turnaround in IBM’s fortunes
Yes Gerstner indeed it was, Watson Admirer, the man who made an elephant dance
Sounds like Gerstner to me, although he did some good things for IBM, he did unfortunately seem to set a trend for senior executives to take vast sums of money in remuneration which was very damaging in the longer term to the company IMHO.
Yes dear old Max Relic I knew him well, Dick. Clearly IBM were the pioneers in what became standard industry pricing strategy – although it was respectabilised by being called ‘pricing to value’.
Rex was a great guy. After the book was published he discovered that private detectives were sniffing around and he had difficulty finding a publisher for the second edition
IBM has always been thus.
In the mid-1970s a pioneering computer journalist, Rex Malik, published an unflattering book on IBM “And tomorrow the world”. One thing, amongst many others, that emerged was that IBM did not know how much it was costing to build their mainframe computers. They just put a wet finger in the sir and calculated the pain level of their customers and charged just below it.
They are not alone. Just visit the web pages of Dell or HP. These are excruciatingly slow, full of technical errors, many links lead to dead end pages and navigation is a disaster. I can only assume they run these web pages on their own servers and therefore we should avoid them.
Once I got a popup box asking me for a review of their pages. Rarely have I taken the opportunity with more energy and enthusiasm as I did then.