What’s the status of IBM these days? They are treated like an obsolete dinosaur in my tech circles, but they’re so big that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they are actually cutting edge in some areas (particularly in capital intensive stuff)
Forewarning that this is an incredibly biased viewpoint based on my experience with IBM and their products…
They tend to target slower moving clients, think healthcare or the public sector. They sell them incredibly outdated products which tend to wall them in or limit their choices to other similarly outdated product offerings from IBM.
This begins the support racket, it is not uncommon to see an error from an IBM product instructing you to reach out to your IBM support representative for help in resolving the issue. These support agreements are where quite a lot of their money is made.
It goes deeper, many people who previously worked at IBM end up taking software architect positions within these slow-moving sectors. I am not saying it’s outright, but it seems quite obvious that these people are financially motivated to fold IBM products into any and every opportunity possible.
Basically IBM has developed somewhat of a dark pattern for software sales and they use it to capture their clients. Extricating your organization from the IBM ecosystem is incredibly difficult and often an uphill battle.
For an organization to remove this, it needs to be treated like a metastasized spread, and every person that has ever touched or supported this needs to be removed from the org
Their semiconductor IP division has been cutting edge for decades (particularly before TSMC got copper working).
They kind of act like a bridge between academia and industry, helping to develop academic ideas into something that's viable for high volume manufacturing.
I don't know enough about their operations to answer with certainty, but I believe those fabs were generally more mature nodes for mil/gov (in fact I think they were the only semiconductor manufacturers approved for mil/gov use).
Judging by the fact the number of patents they file doesn't seem to have gone down after 2015, I'm going to guess not.
IBM isn’t that big. They are way smaller than trillion dollar companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Amazon etc.
They may have similar revenue to Intel, but they lack focus. Being so spread out they don’t really dominate any segment. What they are great at is marketing compared to say Accenture which is roughly the same size.
Their goal is to replace staff with AI, although they suck at it:
> A WatsonX chatbot is years behind ChatGPT," Blake said. "Its web interface was horribly broken to the point of being unusable until July 2024, and no one in the entire organization uses it.
> IBM is nearly done getting back the $34 billion that it spent.. to acquire open source software supporter Red Hat.. [which] doubled in size since the acquisition, with an annual run rate of $6.5 billion and delivering a compound annual growth rate “in the mid teens” over those five years.. OpenShift had an annualized run rate of a mere $100 million when IBM took control and is now running at $1.3 billion, a factor of 13X increase over the five years
They are working on quantum computing, so they do have cutting edge tech in some sectors, but as mentioned, they make their money on their rather outdated infrastructure.
Well they certainly aren't the biggest but their cloud operation is still pretty large and somewhat nice. Noone is even close to IBM in Quantum cloud offerings.
I really don't understand why people say IBM is dying, its literally one of the most successful and revenue producing companies in the world with plenty of room for growth with their investments in Quantum. The just don't provide as many consumer facing products so everyone assume's they're dead.
What is the bull case for a Cloud-based quantum computing offer? Are there really billions of dollars of workloads out there that have any realistic chance of migrating to IBM quantum tech within a decade? Two decades?
Late response, but how are they irrelevant they're 63rd give or take on the Fortune 100 and they're growing just as much as any other company in that size range. They're just not relevant to the average Joe because they don't really make products for us. They make products for other fortune 500 companies.
