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A comment on IBM’s Old Playbook. Parent comment

Re:IBM’s Old Playbook by user5994461 on Monday October 29, 2018 @05:09PM (#18331495)
It's all contractors being sub contracted to other companies. If they laid off 10% of their workers overnight it wouldn't matter because it's the normal cycle of contracting.

There can be no growth because contractors don't scale. They bring a fix percentage of their day rate.

There could be some products with great people lost in a corner of IBM. However, they will remain a negligible fraction of the company and they won't have the power to turn it around.

If AWS/Microsoft makes a new product or service, they can roll out instantly everywhere and capture clients. If IBM does something new, they couldn't begin to sell it, they'd sell you a contractor.

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Re:IBM’s Old Playbook by jacquesm on Monday October 29, 2018 @09:03PM (#18333164)
> There can be no growth because contractors don't scale.

Except of course that when you employ 300K of them it does scale. The mistake many software people make is that only software scales, but IBM (and others) has successfully built a scalable model around consulting.

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Re:IBM’s Old Playbook by user5994461 on Tuesday October 30, 2018 @08:25AM (#18335825)
It scales strictly linearly with the number of sub contractors.
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Re:IBM’s Old Playbook by cgh on Monday October 29, 2018 @05:23PM (#18331642)
> There can be no growth because contractors don't scale. They bring a fix percentage of their day rate.

IBM's revenue growth over at least the last three quarters is due to its mainframe business and the launch of the z14.

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