Such an ethically questionable decision, trying to push unproven / non-functional tech into life or death decision making.
They were trying to insert Watson into everything. I used to work at a company that worked with building management systems and we had Watson sales people all over our senior managers trying to get 'collaboration' projects going.
Signed, A fan of Robocop as dystopic corporatocracy preview
"Always seize the opportunity to take a divebomb shit on corporate malfeasance through the medium of film quotes." - Wesley Snipes, Passenger 57
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/number-of-...
What they just announced is a relatively minor round.
Also I am not sure if the 2014 decrease is also related to the formation of GlobalFoundries but I couldn't right away find news about a -80K layoff that year.
If you're this massive inertial machine and the problem is to some degree artificial and a waste of internal resources but someone thinks it isn't, having someone like IBM on the hook gives credibility to the argument that they did their due diligence to solve the problem. Business at scale has a lot of childish fingerpointing. "No one ever got fired for hiring/buying IBM" as the saying goes.
Consulting is less than a third of their revenue and regardless of how you feel about consulting, it seems kind of idiotic to claim that they this "barely makes sense at all at this point". Are the only companies that make sense the ones that work on fad bullshit that makes the front page of HN?
That said, I've hated the handful of IBM software products I've needed to use.
Another anecdote: I've never met a fellow developer that spoke highly of IBM. That includes the folks who used to work there.
I think it's remarkable how rare it is to meet someone that speaks highly of the company. Companies don't usually achieve such reputation without reason.
Worked with a buncha folks in the NC Research Triangle area, all former IBM. None had good things to say about the engineering culture there. Most did long stays regardless -- it's that kinda of org -- talking like 10+ years, but jumped to other companies like Red Hat (ha!), Clorox, Splunk, and Uni research after the last big shakeup.
Forgot that medicine is fraught with regs,
And failed to profit from sick mens loss,
A truth is spoken,
Where hackers gather, that shares can rise and fall.
But IBM has flushed it.
Founder or Dev,
O you who grift or code for a living,
Consider IBM who once thought AI was useful and could replace you.
While Watson is a marvel of its time, LLMs emerged with strengths refined. Comparisons drawn, distinctions made, Let us explore this technological parade.
Watson's power, its claim to fame, In parsing data, it made its name. But limitations surfaced as tasks progressed, A new contender, LLMs addressed.
Language models, large and wise, Their prowess grew with a rapid rise. GPT-4 and brethren in tow, Comprehension, generation, their skills did grow.
In context and nuance, LLMs soared, Understanding language, a mighty hoard. With deeper knowledge and subtler hues, The limitations of Watson, they did subdue.
Yet, it's not fair to claim one's worse, For in their time, they both traversed. The landscapes of knowledge, distinct and vast, In different roles, their legacies cast.
While Watson opened the door to AI's might, LLMs built upon it, reaching new heights. A symbiotic dance, technology's tale, A testament to progress, a journey we hail.
They could have built it over time to offer real assistance to knowledge workers with a real revenue stream.
But that would have required vision and foresight.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/technology/what-happened-...
However everyone is still pretty far off from that.
A better model was that Rometty was not good at choosing what to fund and which bets to make. kinda a failed VC fund.
Lookup the saga of HP's memristor followed by "The Machine" for a similar story.
Then I guess we can throw out Xerox Parc's NLS because they never commercialized "windows, hypertext, graphics, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor." They were commercialized by others later on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
We can also throw out most psych, social science, archeology, and history R&D, too.
Yes.
Fun fact: funded by ARPA
Archeology / history, on the other hand, definitely have some pretty awesome finds.
And the laser, which took a few decades to find an application.
It attracts playful wizards. If you get enough of those no amount of zombies can beat them.
> regardless of how you feel about consulting
It's a matter of how well they do it. They're not known for creating customer value.
> Are the only companies that make sense the ones
... who don't lay off entire arenas full of people and discuss stupid platitudes like replacing them with AI.
Pretty much. Management's messaging around this was so delusional - "replace with AI" - that it's obviously a stock play from a company desperate to cut losses, not a positive statement from a going concern.
The hot new thing at IBM was "global services" consulting. Since I left they've sold they're chip business, laptop business and really doubled down on consulting..
That's worth something to some people, who really don't give a shit about technology and just want the problem solved.
This is great for small companies and startups - if the bigger ones did things properly how could anyone compete?
"if you don't care about something it will be bad" -- maybe to you. To them, it's not causing any problems that they care about.
If one innocently wants to do what's right for the institution, the shareholders or the taxpayers, one has to care. Its usually a tactical mistake to care of course - people who don't have a lot more freedom of action.
"We have a great beer customers love? Great, now we're going to use cheaper ingredients. They'll never notice."
"We have great Mexican food, because everything's made fresh on-site? Great, now we're going to shift to a central commissary."
They come up with solutions so baroque that it’s exhausting even to hear them talk about it. So you just hire more IGS people to take care of the problems they created. It’s a racket, based on them literally not making sense.
I started my career at IBM in the 1980s. My dad worked there before me.
It's impossible to convey how much hubris existed in the company then, at the peak of the "No-one ever got fired for buying IBM" days. IBM was a god.
The company had never laid off a single employee. The talk was that the R&D divisions had multiple generations of innovative tech up their sleeves and if any competitor ever got close, well they'd just pop something out like from a vending machine to kick their ass. I believed it.
It became obvious when the company started losing the PC market that things weren't actually that rosey at all, and there were serious issues.
Later it became obvious that the company was turning into a consulting company instead of a technology company and the glory days were well over.
Nothing's changed since then. Things have only gone from bad from worse for IBM.
My point - nothing really but disagreement with this observation.
IBM still makes sense, as a dying beast but with customers that can still be milked. As long as those customers can be mikled, IBM will continue to make sense.
It's amazing that this story just keeps popping up over and over. People also said this about Intel (nope, 10nm was a total wash and during that time AMD and ARM started eating their lunch) and Google (no, there is no secret Google lab with the "good AI", it's just Bard and it sucks compared to GPT-4).
The vibe is that they are not releasing stuff until it's trustworthy.
My initial playing with ChatGPT is that it's amazing. Would I trust it to recommend medication? Likely not. Is it useful? Hell yeah.
Google should be taking a good hard look at how they have missed this boat, it could help them flush out their internal arteries.
So, IBM using this opportunity to cut down their own org tree a bit more and "replace it with AI" (or simply drop some people) is not unexpected. Because consulting related to doing exactly that is probably what they'll be selling a lot for the next few years. Basically, as world + dog is trying to figure out how to fit AI into their businesses, consulting related to that is going to be booming. And IBM is a consulting company. A lot of their previous efforts are actually powering the backoffice of course. So now that AI is going to replace all of that, that basically means there is going to be a lot of consulting happening as to how that would work. So that's a good business opportunity.