From Watson Jr to Watson AI: IBM's changed, and Papa Watson wouldn't approve

IBM had respect for the individual?

Bullshit. Look at how they treated Lynn Conway. Take a look at her Wikipedia entry as well. IBM totally wrote her out of the history of the invention of advanced CPU techniques..

Watson is illustrative of how far the company has fallen. Watson, once upon a time, was the Jeopardy-destroying supercomputer, an incredible research achievement. Now it's nothing but a shared brand name for a dozen unrelated and overlapping second-tier technologies acquired across the last ten years.

I work in data & analytics for one of IBM's biggest partners in Europe. I've had more presales briefs and insider training on "Watson" than I care to remember, and I couldn't for the life of me explain to you exactly what it is or what it does.

I am increasingly of the belief that's it's fundamentally just a scheme to wrangle free tickets to Wimbledon, the F1 and the Rugby World Cup by sticking their sports into shit adverts for them all to feel good about.

Cringeley is spot on and not just about IBM.

Robert X Cringeley wrote: "The lesson in all this – a lesson certainly lost on Ginni Rometty and on Sam Palmisano before her – is that companies exist for customers, not Wall Street. The customer buys products and services, not Wall Street. Customers produce revenue, profit, dividends, etc., not Wall Street. IBM has alienated its customers and the earnings statements are showing it."

This should be part of every company'smission statement. They all seem, at some point, to forget that customers are what keeps the doors open, the lights on, and the bonuses coming in. Yet, they all bow to the stock market like it will save them. They fail to see that Wall Street is concerned about what comes into their pockets and not how it got there. When a company loses it's customers and ends up being picked apart by the vultures, Wall Street moves on to the next victim. IBM is just a speedbump in Wall Street's money grab.

What would a private IBM be like, I wonder?

It would be very interesting to see something huge like a pension fund or investment house leverage-buyout IBM and take it private. You would need Sagan-esque "billions and billions" of dollars to do it, but the experiment would be fascinating. It seems to me that any company with so much in the way of resources, patents and intellectual capital could do incredibly well when removed from the yoke that is the public market. I've been watching the slow decline of IBM for quite a while from the outside, just as an observer and occasional customer.

That would be an MBA case study for the ages and any success would probably cause MBA's brains to self-destruct. They've been conditioned for so long to manage purely by spreadsheet, not own anything, focus on next quarter, get rid of as many talented expensive people as they can, and care only for the share price.

I'm old (just turned 40 last year,) but I still say that large employers owe some loyalty to their workers if that loyalty is returned. People work for large employers because they're not Silicon Valley entrepreneur types -- they're there to do a job. In previous times, a job well done was rewarded with promotions, competitive pay and no capricious layoffs. I do know a lot of older IBMers who echo the article's sentiments -- up until Gerstner showed up and shook things up, it was a great place to work. You could expect to be moved several times in a career and put in a lot of extra time for the company,but it was rewarded with a stable life for one's family. I think one of the problems is that employees are seeing even the IBMs, the GEs and the other huge companies treating their employees as disposable. Once that gets too far embedded in people's psyche, they're not willing to give any loyalty back which is why you see people leaving jobs after only a year for just a small salary increase or silly perk that the current company doesn't have.

I'd comment, but...

I'll leave it to a ElReg hack to privately email me and then they will know why.

Salespeople and lawyers

How does IBM expect to differentiate its services and support if the company is providing the same offshored service and support as cheaper, more commoditized rivals? What difference will there be between IBM and an Indian outsourcing company such as Wipro?

Having seen it from the inside, their main approach is two complementary areas:

• Over the top Sales people promising literally impossible "sounds good" things to managers not understanding technology
• Lawyers for reducing the fallout (fines, contract renegotiations/cancellations potential PR exposure) for the customers who get sick of it

With the aforementioned EPS manipulation to appear "everything is all good" to Wall St.

Sad but true

Every time we bid for work, leadership outside the country dictates a profit margin that we don't believe is achievable, and often dictates the solution based on what the company is trying to sell at the point in time, rather than what we think is most appropriate for the customer.

If we're lucky enough to make the sale, we're left struggling to implement buggy, bleeding edge technology (coughPureFlexcough) or God help us, Watson, without the resources and expertise to do it. Somehow we eek out enough value and build enough of a client relationship to make it through the contract, all the while trying to manage the lunatic obstacles that our own company places in our way.

Respect for the individual? I usually feel like a barrel being pushed around an 80's platform game.

Customers,

To paraphrase, I've Been Moved mantra is "Customers! We don't need no stinking customers!" Itsy Bitsy Moron, now Little Blue, is now just another bloated company with no compelling products or services. In respects they are much worse shape than Slurp who has a product every computer user needs - an OS.

IBM had a very solid mythology built around it - but it was exactly that, mythology. There was technical myth, but the software technology was second rate, even if they did build solid hardware. According to Edsger Dijkstra:

"In my Turing Lecture I described the week that I studied the specifications of the 360, it was [laughter] the darkest week in my professional life. In a NATO Conference on Software Engineering in 1969 in Rome, I characterized the Russian decision to build a bit-compatible copy of the IBM 360 as the greatest American victory in the Cold War."

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/8/96632-an-interview-with-edsger-w-dijkstra/fulltext

(In this article it is clear there is a difference between European computing and American. European computing is about software and building machines to support software, American computing is about building electronic hardware and inflicting its foibles on software people.)

IBM would do business at any cost:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

That is just one specific period of history. For a more general history of IBM from its start with Thomas Watson senior at NCR (where he picked up very unethical practices) through to all its market domineering, monopolistic anti-trust practices read Richard DeLamarter "Big Blue: IBM's Use and Abuse of Power"

https://www.amazon.com/Big-Blue-IBMs-Abuse-Power/dp/0396085156

but this book is very hard to find.

On the following page I review three books about IBM:

http://ianjoyner.name/IBM_Books.html

The three books are

“In Search of Excellence” by Peters and Waterman (1982 Harper & Row)

“Beyond IBM” by Mobley and McKeown (1989 Penguin)

“Big Blue, IBM’s Use and Abuse of Power” by Richard DeLamarter (1986 Pan books)

IBM was built on a myth, not a solid foundation. What it is undergoing now exposes what it always was.

Oooh Oooh I can answer this...

"What difference will there be between IBM and an Indian outsourcing company such as Wipro?"

From my perspective of having inherited both as 3rd party SI's on large scale SAP and ERP implementations my answer is thus:

The difference is that IBM are only slightly less shit and clueless than Wipro when it comes to (A) the quality of thought capital, (B) the understanding of and adherence to contractual terms, (C) planning and management, and (D) execution.

Can I get my 5 points and cuddly toy now?

My father-in-law

My dear father-in-law was a perfect IBM employee (US) for over forty years. They were, for him, the perfect employer. He was a classic engineer-type: logical, meticulous, painstaking, with an occasional flash of insight. He was a great employee; dark suit, white shirt and sober manner, who could diagnose hardware or software, and was willing to crawl under a machine, suit and all, to check wiring. IBM showered him with extra training, awards, excellent pay and, when he retired, an excellent pension. Although he remained a company man to the end of his 90 years, and would have given up a body part before publicly criticizing them, privately he mourned that the company he gave his working life to had changed unrecognizably.

Tough times, but there's still a spark at IBM

Bill Macinnes' piece is important.

I grew up surrounded by IBMers in Endicott NY (IBM's place of birth). I joined IBM in the late '90's when we moved to San Francisco just prior to announcing the first outside CEO - Mr. Gerstner. When we arrived in the Bay Area things were hopping. Both my wife and I had job offers within the week and I had to decide between a number of start-ups and IBM. Growing up I swore I would never become a 'company man' but for some reason, I decided to go with Big Blue and I've been there ever since.

I experienced first hand the pivot IBM had to make in the wake of getting destroyed by Intel based, n-tier computing. While a the same time SUN MicroSystems was red hot which was truly hurting IBM, and to make matters worse the .com boom was in full swing and it looked like we were not going to participate.

But then IBM refocused. And when we did it was a sight to behold. Through thought leadership we made markets. I learned so much from so many great people during that period. IBMers are smart, resilient folks. One thing about IBM is that for better or worse management is decisive. Which has created a cultural construct that still exists today - keep looking forward. In fact, I like to remind skeptics that if was in the very midst of that tumultuous/Gerstner era that IBM announced a virtually unprecedented policy of extending benefits to committed same-sex unions (partners). That made a lot of IBMers proud - especially in the San Francisco community. We were proud to be part of an IBM that was, once again, demonstrating social vision.

There's no doubt that this time around is a bit different. Moral is down, but I believe IBM is making a pivot, evolving as a thought leader and, once again, starting to make markets. IBMers are tough and every day I have an interaction with a colleague in a way that reminds me the spark is still alive.

I don't disagree with the spirit of this piece nor most of the comments. I look at some of the people walking out the door and it's a head-scratcher. Really good, smart people. And I realize I'm susceptible too. Anyone is, but I still believe IBM can be great.

I was suprised to learn while talking to a consultant who has worked for IBM that the average IBM employee has been there for less than 5 years.

Watson will be another Ask Cheeves or whatever it was called.

I'm a former employee. They are advertising plenty of jobs. For a laugh I've applied to some. Posted a perfect CV. Best man for the job at least on paper. Sort of person you'd definitely want to speak to.

However, British name. British phone number.

Did I get a call? Of course not. Either they know I'll be too expensive, or the job doesn't actually exist and they're pretending that they're offsetting those they're firing with new hires .

Honestly, try it. I think I might actually document it next time and publicise it.

BTW I'm not disgruntled. At a better employer with loads more pay. Sad to see the destruction of the company though. Had some great times there.

Lot of interesting comments. IBM began its slow downhill spiral even before Gerstner. The 1069 consent decree gave one push. Also, back in the early 70s, after the 370 announcement, IBM began the next multi-billion project called FS (Future Systems). Unfortunately, the H/W tech at the time was not sufficiently advanced to pull it off. The project was canceled (although the in-house joke was Rochester never got the word and implemented part of the architecture in the AS/400). In the meantime, the rest of the company went into a shell to speak. Also, the mind-set of those running the company (salesmen types) believed if you could move the world to the large OS (MVS -> VS/2).

What blind-sided them was the advent of the PC. Forgetting their own history, the attitude of top management was "PCs were kid's toys", when they had more power than the 1400 series, IBM's first successful mass-marketed mainframe. Tandy sold a PC called the Color Computer, which ran OS/9 (Unix clone) in 64K of memory and a HD with more capacity than the IBM 1311 drives. Also, the success of the System/38 and AS/400 went unheeded. When they finally, did get into the market, they were advised by many of their technical people to develop in-house, but management wasn't sufficiently serious to do so - but that's another story. I believe one of the earlier posters mentioned they were "schizo" on the PC business and I agree to an extent, but the mainframes were still selling. Things worsened under Akers and when Gerstner came in, that was the final nail in the coffin.

Will IBM ever be able to reverse this downhill spiral, hard to say. While Watson AI certainly has some potential, its going to take more than just selling its services. Certainly, catering to the whims of Wall Street isn't going to help - it has its own best interests and as soon as it has picked IBM clean, on to the next. What IBM should have been doing rather than selling off its business units, was to grant them autonomy to get "lean and mean" (and should have been done back in the Aker's time (and, probably in Opel's)). It had been suggested more than once, but again the "schizophrenia" of one business unit eating into the supposed profits of the other units kept this from happening.

As long as the CEOs of companies like IBM keep catering to the greed on Wall Street, one can see the dominoes fall. The politicians will bail out those companies deemed to big to fail as they did in 2009 in the US. After all, both political parties in the US are owned by Wall Street. The "Street" has invested millions in the Clintons, one reason why they are so anti-Sanders and anti-Trump, afraid they can't be bought will be able to shake things up to detriment of Wall Street.

IBM is an internal market place

Two points if i may...

IBM is full of in-fighting. Employees are incentivised to be better than their piers. Depts are incentivised to be better than their piers and countries are incentivised to be better than their piers. This is why IBM's software set is such a confusing mish-mash of offerings. Every new acquisition has its own goals and isn't towed into line PDQ. No one can tell you - including IBM - what it's one definitive answer is to a solution. Just ask the guys at Hursley how many ESBs IBM has (five I think !!).

Second point: I'm glad to see that someone else has caught up with the IBM ers. When I worked there we used to say that the company was being run only for the top execs in IBM. It wasn't being run for the customers, it certainly wasn't being run for the employees - the only message relayed down was the share price. And who made the most direct money out of the share price - the execs ! (go look at when they sell shares - say no more !).