back to article IBM rides 'third supercycle of growth'

IBM hosted its annual investor briefing yesterday at the TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, which will probably go down in history as the place where the Watson question-answer machine (it is not a supercomputer, at least not yet) was built and whipped humanity's ass at Jeopardy!. While the 20 top brass …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Allison Park

    Cheers to optimism

    Gotta love a upbeat can do attitude, when other companies are talking about losing their soul.

    1. HoboHro

      Lost It

      IBM long ago lost it's soul.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Down

      Re: Cheers to optimism

      An IBM marketing person would love it, of course.

      This is 2nd time I've caguht Allison Park posing as a nobody admiring IBM products, when she is

      clearly an insider.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    huh

    "There is a lot of confidence in Asia, ...Young people are inspired, there's a can-do attitude, .... You wouldn't recognize that you are on this planet."

    Why *wouldn't* they be more optimistic, when IBM is taking away our jobs in the developed countries, and moving them to the "growth markets"?

    And why *wouldn't* someone in the "old" IBM be a bit-less "can-do" when they have been shafted repeatedly by the company? And seen their future pension decimated. And have to take personnel concerns to a call-centre in Bratislava or, god help us, Malaysia. (Nothing against Malaysians, but they REALLY don't care about the benefit programs they are being paid to administer).

    IBM is still happily following the strategy created in part by the convicted insider trader, Moffat. Greed is good.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      >huh

      Well, IMHO IBM needs a Lou Gerstner mark 2, a guy with x-ray vision that can see what the company is all about.

      To much of top IBM management seems to have forgotten that IBM is a technology company.

      In my humble opinion the company will not succeed by copying the likes of Dell etc etc. IBM clients don't buy Mainframes or POWER servers cause they are cheap to buy etc. No they buy them cause they are worth the extra money. But if you start to cut corners on these products, the clients will know and it'll cost you.

      And to make top notch products you need top notch technical people. And if you don't have top notch people, you'll just slowly hollow out the brand and be left with a company in trouble like they were in 1991.

      AC

  3. dlc.usa
    Alert

    Fundamentals

    Compare the skill sets of typical high school graduates in the East vis-à-vis the West, in addition to their motivation. Also note that since 10% of India's high school students are in honors programs, India has more honors high school students than the USA has high school students of ANY academic standing or associated motivation.

    1. Jesper Frimann

      Well...

      Things are a bit more complex than that.

      The real challenge for the west is yet to come... If you look at for example what a high skilled bio engineer makes in China compared to for example Denmark, where I live. Then there is a factor of 2 in favour of the danish engineer. But compared to the rest of the population, the dane is perhaps making 2-3 times the average income in Denmark where as the Chinese is making 5-7 time the average income of a Chinese. Hence the Chinese engineer is making a hell of a lot more money relatively to the Dane.

      Now in all the BRIC countries there is an increasing need for 'smart' people. For example china with it's one kid policy will be in need of serious infusion of brain power, if it is to sustain it's huge growth rates.

      IMHO the fact that you will need smart people in the BRIC countries, than they are educating themselves, and the fact that you will have much better living standards on a standard engineering pay in a BRIC country than you will in the west. I think we'll start to see the 'smart' people moving away from the vest.

      // Jesper

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    revenue is flat

    Revenue has been flat for 10 years. All of these increases in EPS and margins are from outsourcing US and EU jobs to India, China and Brazil. Russians are too expensive.

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like