IBM’s Old Playbook

Re:IBM’s Old Playbook by neuromantik8086 on Monday October 29, 2018 @02:22PM (#18329823)

> They're also roughly 100 years old (depending on definitions). They're reinvented and reshaped their business many times. "Two new broom handles, two new brushes" but it's still the same company, as they say. I'm afraid I find it ludicrous that IBM would actually end up in anything resembling financial failure.

People were saying the same thing of Sears 10 years ago...

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Re:IBM’s Old Playbook by pslam on Monday October 29, 2018 @02:28PM (#18329895)

Sears falls into the "utter contempt" category, along with utter incompetence. It was obvious to every outside observer their model was busted. It was obvious how bad their stores were to anyone who went there to try to buy something. There was nothing sudden about it, really. I think many could see this happening more than 10 years ago.

Also, unlike IBM, Sears has very little of worth which would uniquely identify it as "Sears" after asset sale. It's all fungible land, rent, concrete store walls, and staff. They have many competitors with practically identical overlap in business. IBM is not like at all like this.

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Re:IBM’s Old Playbook by gaius on Monday October 29, 2018 @03:01PM (#18330236)

It's all fungible land, rent, concrete store walls, and staff. They have many competitors with practically identical overlap in business. IBM is not like at all like this.

Ermm yes it is. What do they do that HPE, DXC, Accenture, Crapita, Fujitsu, TCS, Infosys, Wipro yadda yadda don’t? All IBM had left is the rapidly tarnishing prestige of their once mighty brand.

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Re:IBM’s Old Playbook by marcosdumay on Monday October 29, 2018 @02:46PM (#18330076)

> It was obvious to every outside observer their model was busted.

Well, imagine I am somebody at the target market of IBM (whatever that is), why would I want to hire them?

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Re:IBM’s Old Playbook by dsmithatx on Monday October 29, 2018 @05:15PM (#18331567)

IBM's customers are the same as Microsoft's customers (at least the high profit ones). Very large enterprise companies locked into contracts worth millions and 100s of millions of dollars. They move slow like icebergs and carry as much weight.

They don't worry about new customers when the largest companies in the world have gone through months or years to get them as preferred tier one vendors.

Sears on the other hand did not serve large Enterprises and were generating revenue mostly from retail. Consumer vs. Enterprise is like Apples and Oranges guys.

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Re:IBM’s Old Playbook by marcosdumay on Monday October 29, 2018 @06:23PM (#18332133)

Hum... I work in a large MS customer. We are a happy customer for some measure. We are also an Oracle customer, and happier than I would expected to be possible if I didn't know about there.

I just can't imagine anything we could hire from IBM.

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Re:IBM’s Old Playbook by nnforall on Monday October 29, 2018 @03:29PM (#18330508)

So you're saying IBM is more like Kodak?

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Re:IBM’s Old Playbook by dsmithatx on Monday October 29, 2018 @05:20PM (#18331617)

Kodak like Sears made money on retail consumers. IBM like Microsoft make a majority of revenue on Enterprise customers and service contracts.

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Re:IBM’s Old Playbook by gaius on Tuesday October 30, 2018 @04:32AM (#18334749)

I’m not sure that’s true. In the days of film the average consumer shot <1 roll per year. Whereas a professional photographer would shoot a dozen or more rolls per day. Their biggest customers would have been newspapers and studios buying 10,000 rolls at a time on a regular basis

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Re:IBM’s Old Playbook by mack1001 on Monday October 29, 2018 @11:44PM (#18333879)

Have you heard of EDS? How about HP global? They were selling to enterprises and still became obsolete..

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Re:IBM’s Old Playbook by noelsusman on Monday October 29, 2018 @07:07PM (#18332475)

No, they weren't. They were in a pretty much constant decline since the mid-70s, with shit really hitting the fan in the 90s and early 2000s.

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/28/business/big-change-is-ex...

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