Bonum Certa Men Certa

Stagnant, Shrinking Businesses and "IBM's Corporate Culture Since the Late 1980s... Over 35 Years."

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 01, 2024,
updated Nov 01, 2024

Universal SCART cable

By Peter E. Greulich:

IBM revenue

Supermicro:

Supermicro shares

IBM:

IBM Common Stock $236 about a week ago

IT is November already (how a year flew by!) and election is only days away in the United States. US national debt is already at over 35,849 billion dollars or 102,466 billion dollars if business and personal debt are also accounted for. A lot of businesses, including Microsoft, have very considerable liabilities and debt. There's a saying that "debt is the new currency" (deficit spun as "credit").

Recently, IBM was using share price as a talking point, insisting the company was doing OK while tens of thousands were being laid off in secret. The stock reached $237.37, but this week it plummeted as low as $204.9 and even claims of a revenue increase did not impress shareholders. One new comment: (an hour ago)

All numbers are available, and every analyst who tracks IBM professionally (for their job) knows what is going on. The problem now is that this situation has gone on for so many years that most people have either become numb to it, they have stopped caring, they have moved on, they have retired, or they have died.

Yeah, it's been going on for that long...like a war that never ends. Permanent dismissals via RAs have become ingrained in IBM's corporate culture since the late 1980s...over 35 years. All the numbers are put out for public consumption. Every quarter that an RA occurs, reports are distributed showing (if memory serves) which positions were cut by job title and band (no names). All dollar amounts of RAs in total can be determined by reading the annual reports that are given to stockholders.

The bottom line is that IBM has been selling out and going to cash for all those years. Yeah, it su-ks as an IT business...but IBM's management hasn't been running IBM as an IT business. They've let the company run itself down, they've got little to no new products in the pipeline, and they regularly churn and burn personnel. But what they have excelled at is playing games with the books and keeping the dollar figures up, and that's all that the majority of the shareholders really care about anyway.

If Google or Apple were run in a similar manner, then everyone would say "Google and Apple have huge problems, someone's gotta fix it". This no longer happens at IBM, even in forums like this...why is that? It no longer happens because everybody has learned to live with it and are just interested in day to day survival. That's what happens when a bad situation is allowed to fester for so long.

A lot of the "growth" they claim is... well, fake (cooking the books [1, 2]) and Microsoft's plan to grow "HEY HI" (AI) revenue boils down to, REBRAND more things as "HEY HI". Microsoft nowadays tries to connect Clown Computing with "HEY HI" while constantly firing a lot of Azure staff.

How much faking can Wall Street withstand?

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