Can anyone share a good IBM experience? I'm honestly interested.
The IBM pc we bought in the 90ies was fantastic.
It had working suspend resume many years ahead of other computers and came with 365/24 free phone support for a year (and the next years was about 50USD). This being was very useful since I didn't have Internet access.
The support team had unlimited time, patience and knowledge and would walk me (15-16 y.o) through any procedure including if necessary: backup, reconfigure disk with fdisk, restore os from backup etc etc. I learned a whole lot from them both technical stuff as well as how to deal with customers ;-)
(And yes, old IBM ThinkPads were very popular IIRC.)
Edit: details.
As the supplier you should back yourself as to whether its likely that your changes will cause an issue or not. If so, issue a warning, otherwise don't.
The reason I say this is not for your customer's benefit but for yours. I've seen people get all knotted up with process because someone had the bright idea that the customer should be notified when absolutely anything changes behind the scenes - just in case. This abundance of caution will make your life a misery, and stops any rapid movement. It also desensitizes the customer, who gets used to your notifications and eventually decides they can ignore them.
Its almost seems like when you can get away with milking the system, nobody seems to have any moral qualms in selling the government a $200 screwdriver.
You really don't have to go far to find stories of IBMs cost cutting, moving staff to the lowest possible cost locations, poor treatment of staff etc.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/06/ibm_retracts_agreed... is one recent example.
I gave current examples of competency. Its trivial to find others. In any case, my point was merely to differenciate services from products, so I'm not sure what you were replying to anyway.
I remember hearing about it then, but I cannot now find details of the problems.
It's not uncommon for large government projects to fail with all the bureaucracy and politics that is in play. I am not saying IBM is great, but this article is just not worth it.