It is actually a cycle. Managers in an enterprise are judged based on their ability to deliver low cost solutions ie "savings". IBM(or any service business) is very good at selling these low cost solutions to managers.

We are starting a project and even with FTE's within the company, "consultant" has convinced management to hire IBM resources because of cost. The high sounding reason within the presentation twisted it to - FTE's are not expert in this tech so they won't be able to do an efficient job.

But it is always that the end resources from IBM are even more incompetent. They end up delivering a product which is terrible. Even the final handovers and KTs are done terribly.

In the end, management has no option but to continue hiring IBM (or any service business) to support the shoddily done project.

This doesn't mean all implementations from a services business is terrible. It all comes down to cost and ability to spend. If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys - this is aptly true.

To answer your last question - Yes there are different entities within IBM. There is GBS which takes up most of the consulting and up-selling IBM products and services. Development for example Watson is done by IBM Labs. A list can be found here: http://www-07.ibm.com/in/careers/businessunits.html

> But it is always that the end resources from IBM are even more incompetent. They end up delivering a product which is terrible. Even the final handovers and KTs are done terribly.

At an old employer who I'm no longer with, I asked why there's a part of the application in Java (the rest has always been in .net). They told me that an army of IBM consultants made that decision and now there's a part of the code in Java and it sticks out like a sore thumb.

So OK , you can do this cycle for some time, for a few people.

But doesn't the word get around ? does nobody in most enterprizes think long-term when investing ?

No, because if you think for the long term you can find that you are not around after a short term.

No one at this level thinks further than their next annual bonus. If the wheels come off after who cares, they've moved on to do the same thing to the next company...

> I mean how can a company build shitty products like this and be a world leader in services ?

IBM is optimized in enterprise (including government) sales. Product is not quite irrelevant, but it's a specialized enough market that often mediocre substantive quality does quite well, because the only competition that matters are the others that are optimized for that market.

They sell products to people who will never personally use them. The executive signing cheques on the golf course has a PA to deal with its day to day use...

c'mon they aren't the IT's crown jewel but you're doing a disservice to them. while products have accrued years of shit, as every old product does, it is extremely frustrating for very large enterprises and governments to talk with system integrators or even startup - most often than not their product is totally not ready to cope with the audit requirements, security requirements, they often don't even have a clue of what enterprises need on that front neither how to handle all the red tape around security certifications, legal requirements, disclosures requests that those clients usually have.

Reminds me of https://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

Click that link from inside HN...

I knew what happens :)

> I mean how can a company build shitty products like this and be a world leader in services

Wasn't there a saying that no one got fired for buying IBM.

It's used in real life in a non joking manner.

I've seen it many times.

Yeah, in like 1975.

Or 2017. Things may change, but not as fast as some people hope.

if i ran a company, and the manager/*EO level personnel purchased IBM, i would've fired them.

but you didn't, right?

Traditionnaly at that scale, the people buying the product and the ones ending up using it are completely insulated by layers of bureaucracy. As long as the product can somewhat work, there won't be much repercussions for making shitty choices: the feedback won't go up enough or be ignored (as it is inconvenient)

> insulated by layers of bureaucracy

Misinterpretation is a recursive problem. The best description - by far - of this process is "How a plan becomes policy" (aka, "How Shit Happens").

https://funnyshit.com.au/the_plan.html

They optimized for the thing which is currently important: Convince decision-makers that your product is the way to go - by any means necessary. This is as much a reflection on the tech peoples inability to actually influence companies buying decisions as it is on IBM. If companies started to value sound technology IBM (and Oracle and SAP ..) would shift its priorities.

A lot of that is consulting on and reselling of SAP products. There are many companies in the world that want to move to SAP and haven't been burned by IBM yet.

IBM GS also specializes in complexity. They sell their services to management, but then they come in and make the most complicated system they can sustain, which is too complicated for the full time staff to want to deal with.

As the staff back away slowly from the creep, that just makes more space for IBM, and they sell progressively more service hours. It's pretty much their MO.

>> Do these units operate like two separate entities.

Broadly, yes, IBM is run as various different divisions, and the divisions start very high up the organisation, only a couple of levels from the top. They rarely interact in my experience (as a software guy there for some years in the past)

IBM are not alone in getting away with this. Buyers of big brand products need to shape up and talk with their engineers. It's a farce.

Vendor lock-in.