IBM Global Services always seemed to me to hire exclusively people with an exceptionally high tolerance for complexity (aka 'bullshit'). Every encounter I've had with them has been to build the most complex thing that they could keep running. Which is to say, you couldn't pay your people enough money to deal with it so you have to keep IGS around to maintain what they built. People get exasperated with their convolutions and basically say something like, "Look, whatever. Just do what you want and stop updating me on your latest travesty. I don't want to know." And then they win.

Every time I see their stuff it reminds me of those all-in-one woodworking machines (It's a drill press AND a lathe!) you used to see on infomercials when infomercials were still a new thing. Too goddamned many moving parts, things that can break, and ways you can lose a finger.

Any time I see IBM involved in a JSR, the IGS modus operandi is written all over it.

> Every time I see their stuff it reminds me of those all-in-one woodworking machines (It's a drill press AND a lathe!) you used to see on infomercials when infomercials were still a new thing. Too goddamned many moving parts, things that can break, and ways you can lose a finger.

You mean a Shopsmith? Those have been around since before infomercials, and they are still producing new versions. They're actually a decent combination wood lathe/horizontal boring drill press (which both already need the fancy variable speed drive), and there's nothing complicated about the disc sander that needs a separate machine. But yeah, the table saw option doesn't feel right...

I was thinking of their competitor... mighty something?

But I believe you could order a VHS casette (possibly for free) with the informational video long before infomercials became a thing. They just had one ready to go before anybody else.

Why would you think that this has anything to do with IBM's consulting arm and not the fact that IBM maintains their own JVM and employ a ton of JVM experts to develop and maintain it. Jigsaw was a great idea but poor in execution. I feel for the people who put their effort into it and hope that some of the work can be salvaged for the future, but this is one of the cases where it's not worth it to rush through an incomplete solution.

How is it incomplete? It's declaredly small scope, and it meets that goal pretty well.

That may be true; but it's reasonable to be against Jigsaw even if you don't want Jigsaw to be a meta-module system.