The Good IBM Managers Have Flown Away, All That's Left is the Book-Cooking Loyalists
Yesterday: Founder of IBM Ventures Has Just Quit IBM
Hours later he wrote about it:
The CEO of Red Hat left. Then came another CEO. He too left. Now there is some dude wearing all-blue suit (a signal to his boss, IBM) telling his staff that they will become "IBM" and many will be subjected to "RTO Layoffs".
Welcome to IBM. Loyalists replace people with qualifications and credentials, as kitchen staff must never ask the chef any tough questions.
Some hours ago somebody explained what happened to management at IBM, once upon a time the "gold standard" for tech companies.
IBM managers were once the golden standard of the industry. But that was a long time ago. Now it is a joke. There are still some good ones but those individuals are very rare in current days. In my area they are all friends with someone higher up. It’s not because of their talent. There are other people who are much more deserving of such roles and would be a much better fit but they were passed over for the friend. And it’s not isolate case but very common. Really it’s the internal culture that makes this happen. It is a symptom that self supports the continuation of the problem.
IBM cannot afford 'expensive' managers anymore. So it insults them and discards them. Quality soon goes down the drain and then the stock sags or tanks due to mere vapourware:
Good. It is time for IBM to swim with the fishes. An evil company run by greedy little people. Time to die.
As we noted this morning, IBM's share price makes no sense at all. Last night we showed that when IBM was valued at 77 billion dollars it said its 'goodwill' value was ~67 billion dollars. So what are those 10 billion dollars in difference?
Does anyone check? Is the accountant or 'independent' auditor of IBM seduced by contract renewals and therefore flouts responsibilities?
This is a company in collapse. The next comment said:
IBM mainframe revenue is really quite stable. Not really growing and not really shrinking. Yes some folks migrate specific applications off, but other folks add applications back (thats why IBM buys SW innovation). The migrations off revenue equate to new applications revenue being added. Revenue for the most part grow by price increase that IBM adds every year. If you are on the mainframe and have not migrated strategic legacy off by now, you most likely will not. I suspect it’s too risky vs the financial gain. Power on the other hand is an IBM case study of how to mismanage an 8 billion plus business. IBM Power in the late 90’s and early 2000’s was growing like a weed and was easily an 8 billion plus revenue source. Since then, IBM refused to invest in Power ISV’s and they migrated off over time. AIX Went to LINUX as the migration was easy, so one code stack made sense and LINUX was much much cheaper. OS/400 went to Microsoft as Microsoft invested in ISV’s and IBM did not. ISV’s followed the money, and approx 75% of the ISV’s migrated as Microsoft was “good enough” PLUS Microsoft coders were 1/3 the price. Today IBM struggles to reach 2 billion in Power HW sales (2025 estimate is 1.6-1.7 billion for all Power HW). Heck of a job IBM management. As Dana Carvey imitating Ross Perot said on SNL said “a monkey could do that”.
And the latest comment is about Gerstner:
The G Man Gerstner (arrogant and pompous) bought PwC Consulting for $3,500,000,000 in 2002. That is a lot of Benjamins! Which means perhaps IBM will spin them off to Kyndryl for $1,500,000,000. AI has and will decimate consulting that always over charged and often had people with weak skills but big titles and salaries.
Notice the mention of PwC, connected to alleged accounting fraud at Kyndryl. IBM is just cheating the SEC and shareholders. This seems to be the only thing IBM's management is nowadays good at.
One day it'll end up badly. Maybe they can get another hick (or Hicks) to do the damage control. █
