
The Trouble With IBM - omh
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-05-22/ibms-eps-target-unhelpful-amid-cloud-computing-challenges
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us0r
CIA CTO kind of touched on it:

 _Hunt said that the intelligence agency adopted Amazon Web Services (AWS) to
build its own procurement system. "The security was really superb," he said,
noting that this was also true for a lot of other cloud providers. That
security, he said, was end-to-end and on every layer of the infrastructure
onion.

For the chief information officer, Hunt explained, inner security is just as
important as the fence around a company's networks.

"If they can't find you, they can't attack you. And if they find you and
attack you, you want to be really hard to attack," he said._

[http://www.zdnet.com/former-cia-cto-speaks-out-on-snowden-
le...](http://www.zdnet.com/former-cia-cto-speaks-out-on-snowden-leaks-
amazons-600m-cloud-deal-7000028745/)

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badman_ting
Cringely has written some interesting pieces about it. He seems to essentially
think that the current management is just trying to suck the last bits of
value from the organization.
[http://www.cringely.com/?s=ibm](http://www.cringely.com/?s=ibm)

~~~
hga
As the article for this topic, and Cringely's current 2nd and subsequently
articles in that search point out, the previous CEO made a promise to
massively increase earnings by 2015. In the face of declining sales/revenue,
there aren't that many ways to accomplish that, and of course few aren't
actively harmful to its future.

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omh
The most interesting quote for me:

 _A federal judge agreed, ruling in October that with the “overall inferiority
of its proposal,” IBM “lacked any chance of winning” the contract. The
corporate cliché of the 1970s and ’80s, that no one ever got fired for buying
IBM, had never seemed less true_

~~~
hga
On the other hand, further down, that cloud offering is being retired:

" _[CEO as of 2012] Rometty’s most significant investment has been SoftLayer
Technologies, a smaller rival to Amazon in selling cloud computing to
companies. IBM paid $2 billion for SoftLayer last summer, in the middle of its
bruising CIA fight with Amazon, and afterward began to wind down its own
corporate cloud product._ "

Whether SoftLayer's people can survive in IBM's culture ... well, look at this
compared to, oh, Watson, Sr's 1911 "THINK":

" _Last year [Rometty] began distributing black plastic cards bearing the
phrase “One Purpose: Be essential” to IBM’s roughly 50,000 managers and has
been known to demand to see them as she walks the halls. At IBM, even clarity
is complicated—on the back of the cards are three values and nine instructions
for making customers happy, including “Unite to get it done now” and “Treasure
wild ducks.”_ "

And while the article doesn't mention that services as a business line are
typically a race to the bottom, it does go into how the cloud looks like a
game of thin margins, which doesn't fit IBM at all.

 _Lots_ more bad news further down.

