IBM top brass accused again of using mainframes to prop up Watson, cloud sales IBM, along with 13 of its current and former executives, has been sued by investors who claim the IT giant used mainframe sales to fraudulently prop up newer, more trendy parts of its business. In effect, IBM deceived the market about its progress in developing Watson, cloud technologies, and other new sources of revenue, by …
Watson may have been right
What he though of as "Computers" we now call "Cloud" - read up on the concept of "Utility computing" where an individuals' access to those 5 computers was via a special household cable and terminal.
Now, Count the major cloud vendors.... If you actually count Oracle cloud, there are 5...
and most PCs function mostly as smart terminals. And more and more applications are delivered via "Cloud versions"
IBM "cloud" was an acquisition of SoftLayer and a rebranding of their legacy data centre hosting business combined with the sprinkling of a few small consultancy and software acquisitions.
And the compulsory inclusion of parts of Watson to spread the stench of failure thinly enough to pretend that THIS was going to be Watson's niche where it finally had a positive ROI.
Statista has some nice historical data... https://www.statista.com/statistics/967365/worldwide-cloud-infrastructure-services-market-share-vendor/
"IBM's response, it's claimed, was to retaliate against the employees"
When I was blue, we supposedly had an 'open door' policy and the opportunity to whistleblow anonymously. Enron unfolded just after I joined, us peons had 'Business Conduct Guidelines' education to complete each year, to remind us to act ethically, and now, this?
It seems the execs know IBM is doomed, and are sucking it dry for every dollar while they can.
IBM put us under a lot of pressure to sell the CAMSS dream. The problem being we were 10+ years behind the competition and our products were mostly marketing slides describing smoke and mirrors. When you are 10 years behind in the market your customers generally know more about the technology than IBM did. It took no effort for them to see through the façade Yes they did siphon off revenue from Global Services to prop up the CAMSS illusion. In doing so we had to cut back services -- we simply were not providing the services we were being paid to perform. This had an adverse effect on our customers and their business. This in turn made it nearly impossible to sell the new CAMSS stuff. Customers would ask "why would I buy more stuff from you when you're not providing what we've already paid for?" It was all a deception to prop up the quarterly earnings statements and stock prices, and in turn the executive's compensation.
Those lunatics in the cockpit sold or ended ALL product that connected IBM to the end user who or whose children the would become the decision makers of other companies.
Such a generation has grown up that has no idea about what IBM is (was) so when it comes to purchase there's no reason why these 3 letters would come into their minds at all.
Today kids are playing and CREATING using ChatGPT while Watson (that they never heard of since they were too young or had not even been born when it won jeopardy) needs trained professionals to gain less. Even within the company we have been lying to each other about it to meet the expectations.
This is the background of the Imperatives BS.
And the other side of the story: within IBM whole plants and divisions was robbed from their revenue with that shifting, and then they were being told "no pay rise for you due to insufficient income" for years, basically decreasing their gross salaries and wages in this inflation pressure and there is no chance they will ever be compensated.
I never thought I would say anything like this back then, but yes: I am glad I'll soon be over with this company.
Swallowing all the lies while completing the certification form of the business conducting guidelines has becoming an ever heavier burden.
As a former emloyee, I can confirm that the biggest focus in IBM during my time there was "financial engineering" - visible to the public in the form of stock buybacks to prop up the stock price, but also internally in the form of shifting revenues to the latest "strategy-du-jour" for which executives were handsomely rewarded with boni while the regular employees got shafted. So nothing new here, except perhaps extending the graft to partner companies.
I remember him; a bit 1980s for my taste - I had my fill of that with the university economics papers I took in the mid-80s - but interesting to read his columns even so.
His website is also interesting, even if it's too much 'stream of consciousness' for my tastes and hard work to read. YMMV.
This was going on around 2013-2014.
I was in STG and a Z colleague mentioned he just had a bizarre call from WW wanting to know the Z deal he closed at one of the countries large banks.
When asked why, they person on the other end of the line mentioned that they were from the cloud team and wanted to count a very non-cloud mainframe deal as cloud.
I thought at the time this was somewhat smelly. Things just continued to get worse from there.
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