IBM dragged down by DOGE contract cancellation roulette IBM beat Wall Street's expectations for both revenue and income in the first quarter of 2025, but its stock price still dropped more than six percent in after-hours trading. Some share of the blame for the dip may belong to DOGE, the US government data-scouring, cost-trimming operation unofficially overseen by Tesla and SpaceX …
Don't forget that IBM's founders were salesmen and that this path to high office in the company has never changed: if or when you're trying to work out what IBM will do next, remember this and you're unlikely to be far wrong; their engineers, technical people, etc are very unlikely to be found in senior managerial roles.
And how many jobs have been created in India ?
I think there should be a law whereby, if a multinational corporation cuts jobs anywhere, it does not have the right to create jobs elsewhere before a given amount of months.
If you're firing people, you don't need to hire.
Manufacturing and tariffs seems to have dominated the room currently, but this is every bit as pervasive to the American, Canadian and European workers and losing their job to offshoring, outsourcing and Business Processes.
Tech Jobs in Bangalore, Customer Service Jobs to Manila, Back Office jobs to Romania…..etc.
They are all at it … but Indian Business Machines (IBM) is repeatedly lambasted here.
You haven't read the many a lambasting of ATOS, InfoSys? And IBM deserve the most lambasting. They are the trail blazers of offshoring. They asphyxiated all their hardware divisions to turn into a crappy IT service company. They are probably numero uno for why we are in this tariff hell anyway.
"They asphyxiated all their hardware divisions"
Wasn't there a new Z-series announced a few weeks ago? They may have pivoted to becoming a largely crappy services company by ducking out of the PC-architecture market (they couldn't control it so didn't want to play) and I suppose the mainframe market isn't as vibrant as it was but certainly they still are in H/W.
True, they still have mainframes with their z series. But they used to be in so much more than main frames. And who uses their mainframes anyway? HPC is the trend these days and nvidia leads by a long shot. And IBM has been dabbling in the AI since antiquity, DeepMind, Watson. Whatever happened to Watson? They were selling that as a know it all but the emergence of transformers and LLMs has made Watson an old timer has been.
"I think there should be a law whereby, if a multinational corporation cuts jobs anywhere, it does not have the right to create jobs elsewhere before a given amount of months."
There would need to be so many qualifications to a law like that. In the process, there would be loopholes installed that negate any value.
If you have a facility that chrome plates metal in the US and your process gets banned (or regulated out of existence), you will have to move to stay in business. That could mean leaving the US. If you are smelting metal and using coke (coal, not white powder) when a ban gets dropped on you, there may be no point in trying to stay in place when it would be massively cheaper to build from the ground up in a pro-heavy industry country.
"There would need to be so many qualifications to a law like that. In the process, there would be loopholes installed that negate any value."
Most companies already have an "out" that would be impossible to legislate for without unintended consequences thanks to the varied corporate structures used mostly for tax purposes, ie different divisions, subsidiaries, joint foreign ventures and arms length companies supposedly acting as a franchise. If the tax man can't get around that, I doubt some employment law could manage it. Especially in the US where workers rights are almost non-existent so why would anyone bother even trying?
Can you talk me through that one, please?
I'm not arguing the principle, just confused as to the application.
"I think there should be a law whereby, if a multinational corporation cuts jobs anywhere, it does not have the right to create jobs elsewhere before a given amount of months."
Given the corporation is multinational, which country should make this law, the one where the jobs are to be created or the one where they are to be lost?
Or the one where the company is registered or the one where beneficial ownership rests?
"How many of those government contracts that IBM no longer have, does Musk now have?"
Maybe none, but it could sever the lock-in IBM has had historically. The best way to make sure that your tech is the only one that fits the spec is to make sure you write the spec in a way that keeps everybody else out. You just provide all of the requirements to the person in charge of putting the RFQ's out "to save them the bother of writing them themselves". I've run into that numerous times. The RFQ doesn't explicitly state the make and model of the required equipment, but only one thing will fit the bill and it's covered by patents so it's sole source kit.
I've been following DOGE activity, more or less, and it often consists of finding an excess number of software licences, or renewable licenses for software not being used.
So, it "goes byby". Good riddance to the tune of $BILLIONS.
IBM is no longer on the "brother-in-law" list, it seems...
Somehow I don't think even the Federal Govt' is going to get even close to the projected savings that Musk[*} touted just by rationalising the software licence situation.
* During the run up to the election, he claimed a likely $2T in savings. A while later, he said it would be about $1T. I think currently it's still only in the very low single digit $100B range. With a 130 days per year employment limit and his recent statement that he'll only work for DOGE 1 day per week from now on, he's REALLY got his work cut out for himself now.
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