Wrong Priorities at IBM
Two years ago, just months before the very vast scale of layoffs in "IT", IBM prioritised the wrong things. It has since then fired a lot of staff, including in many layoff waves that we covered recently (in 2023 there were mass layoffs at Red Hat), and it is still downsizing.
With this pair of reports (see below) surfacing in the news today, won't it seem like a waste of money? thestorefront.com says: "It's also one of the most expensive places to rent a retail space. The average rental price for retail space on Madison Avenue is around $250,000 per year."
This is what IBM spends money on right now:
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IBM Opens Manhattan Flagship Office
IBM has opened its 270,000-square-foot flagship office at One Madison Avenue, a 1.4 million-square-foot building in Manhattan. Based in Armonk, N.Y., the Fortune 100 firm signed the 16-year, five-floor lease in 2022.
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IBM opens the doors to its flagship New York City office (PHOTOS)
Hundreds of people, including U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, gathered inside IBM's new flagship New York City office as the tech giant made its debut in Manhattan's Flatiron District on Friday.
IBM signed a 16-year lease two years ago to become the anchor tenant of One Madison Ave., consolidating its nine other offices around the city, including locations in East Village and Midtown, across 270,000 square feet at the new location.
IBM is 60 billion dollars in debt and can only raise 13.7 billion dollars if it really tries, according to its filings.
Lavish spendings on a 16-year contract for the (almost) most expensive place while firing tens of thousands of staff? Must be good for bonuses and vanity at the C suite. Perhaps that's all that matters. The Linux Foundation did something similar in San Francisco, renting an office for just ~200 people at the cost of over 6 million dollars a year, i.e. about $33,000 per worker (for some desk and maybe a shared meeting room for 12 months). The prices have gone up since then. They fired all the staff of Linux.com while blowing away millions per year on some vanity office space, in effect paying a ton of money for an address. █