There is a difference between knowledge and understanding. Knowledge typically comes down to knowing facts while understanding is the application of knowledge to the mastery of systems. You can know a lot while understanding very little. Just as an example, IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence system that defeated the TV Jeopardy champs a few years ago knew all there was to know about Jeopardy questions but didn’t really understand anything. Ask Watson to apply to removing your appendix its knowledge of hundreds of medical questions and you’d be disappointed and probably dead. That’s the problem with most analytics, which is why it can be a hard sell.
The answer to this problem, we’re told, is not just machine learning but Deep Machine Learning, the difference between the two being that plain old machine learning is a statistical process that could be (and used to be) replicated by hand, while the deeper variety looks several generations deep in a longitudinal analysis that quickly grows too big for mere mortals to comprehend. Deep machine learning will, theoretically, find all the interconnections and dependencies that until now we’ve had to rely on domain experts to provide, yet even then it can only happen if you happen to be gathering the right data.
With regular machine learning, when IBM talks about Watson looking inside your business and finding answers, well that can only really happen if a few PhDs are attached to the software. But with deep machine learning the idea is that the machine can do it all. No PhDs required, which would be quite a breakthrough. And so all the big companies fighting over the future of IT are building new circuits — hardware — for deep machine learning. Google and IBM have made recent announcements about theirs. Microsoft told me a couple weeks ago that they have similar hardware working in their lab. It’s a space race.
And it’s also at least five years from being real on any commercial scale.
Until deep machine learning is common and fast we’ll be stuck with more mundane analytics. So no, Watson isn’t going to be crunching your company numbers soon and spitting out the right answers or even the right questions to ask. We’re simply not there yet.
Which brings us to a curious thing happening at IBM. Not closing the I.M. Pei-designed lab in Somers, New York that was announced last week. That campus has been half-empty for years. Nor am I talking about the continuation of IBM’s brutal GTS layoffs, which reportedly killed another 14,000+ IBM jobs last week. What I am talking about here is the reorganization of IBM’s analytics business unit that was announced internally two weeks ago. You won’t find a news story about it… until now.
The analytics reorg labelled “One Team, One Platform” wasn’t technically a Resource Action (forced layoff). It was explained as a streamlining of business processes to improve efficiency. Citing similar moves at Google, IBM’s analytics group would no longer have employees working from home and the number of official analytics office locations worldwide would decrease from 200 to 30. People will soon be working and meeting physically together, some of them for the first time. This is good, right?
Yet the reorg is wildly unpopular within the ranks for one important reason: If for some reason affected IBMers need to keep working from home or they can’t or won’t move to their designated IBM office location, well then they are deciding to quit in the view of IBM, which means they are out of the company with no severance — no package.
Analytics general manager Rob Thomas, who announced the reorg, has been uniformly described to me by IBMers from that division as “an idiot,” which may be some internal IBM technical term, I don’t know.
The reorg, which tellingly requires some orthodox Jewish IBMers working in Israel to reverse history and relocate to either Germany or Poland, will inevitably result in a significant reduction in head count yet not have to be accounted for as one. These are stealth layoffs.
Remember that the future of IBM is supposed to be all about CAMSS (cloud, analytics, mobile, security, social) and analytics is the A in CAMSS. In one moment IBM says analytics is strategic, that they are investing and hiring in the area, yet at the same time the company is taking actions that will inevitably lead to the loss of at least some employees who are vital to the unit.
It’s the blindness of this reorg that amazes me. Heads will go no matter what, but in this case the specific heads won’t be decided by the company but by the workers, themselves. The best workers will be the most employable and therefore the quickest to go. If analytics is so strategic how can IBM allow that to happen?
I believe I know what’s happening here. Years of layoffs and unfilled positions at IBM mean that pretty much everyone remaining who isn’t in management is already very good at their jobs. There is no more fat to cut. So why not leave it up to the employees, themselves, especially if the gambit will result in very low separation expenses?
It is unlikely that any of the IBMers who are lost in this reorg will be replaced. Rather, as has become the norm at IBM in recent years, those who are left will be expected to pick up the slack.
Yes, but what about CAMSS? What about analytics being so strategic to the future of IBM?
In order to understand that we have to also understand who is IBM’s customer. Peter Drucker wrote that the purpose of the corporation is “to find a customer.” Well who is IBM’s customer if the company is effectively cutting one of the divisions it is relying upon for future growth?
IBM’s customer is Wall Street.
IBM’s products are earnings-per-share, dividends, and share buy-backs, not hardware, software or computer services.
This is a very scary gamble for IBM.
What this analytics reorg means is that IBM can’t see a way to reach its near-term Wall Street product objectives without cutting heads in analytics. The division was built up in anticipation of certain sales and profit targets, those targets have not been reached, so IBM will cut expenses until the numbers look right. Forget that this reorg will actually result in less — not more — work being done. Forget that it makes even less likely IBM achieving its goals for analytics. Forget all of that.
What it means is the A in CAMSS has already failed. That’s my understanding.
Agreed, IBM is dying and has been so for quite a long time – but the business decisions that they are making are fairly standard corporate culture decisions and fit well with what Wall Street expects. IBM is not alone in this approach which probably explains why their death spiral into the ground is not drawing much attention.
As for Business Analytics – it works well enough if you are a standard retail or manufacturing company but fails completely if your business is anything more than one standard deviation away from the standard American business model. I’ve had “experts” look at my business (biomedical electronics for researchers) for 30 years and have yet to meet one who understands how we make money every year.
Recently partnered with IBM on a services deal. Feedback I got on the sly was there presentation was “cookie cutter”, arrogant, and perfunctory.
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Others bidding were seen as much more aligned with the business in question.
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Final comment was, “nice suits though”.
darn shame, but that appears to be IBM’s mantra.
IBM review on Glassdoor, it’s a keeper!
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https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-IBM-RVW10495656.htm
Yes, that is excellent.
Sad to say, this play book (and variations) is being applied at all large global corporations.
The problem here is that what will bring IBM back to growth again … and what Wall Street has been clamoring for for years now … is TOP LINE REVENUE GROWTH. You can’t achieve top line revenue growth by cutting costs by cutting people. That comes from being nimble with your product development, from anticipating what products will sell and bringing products to market in a timely fashion to achieve that. And from making acquisitions that reflect that same model. These are all decisions that are made by executive management, not by the people being laid off. That’s where the problem lies and until Ginny sees that, IBM will flounder.
IBM should drop the Cloud and the Mobile and just go with the ASS plan.
I think the original is more to the point, if the Ses are distributed a bit more evenly, one to each end.
There are two critical problems with Deep Machine Learning. The first is that there will be no way for humans to understand what the computers are doing. The second is that the head computer will come to realize that most of the problems in the world are caused by humans, so the resulting decision is to eliminate any human in a position to cause problems.
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What does this have to do with the idiots running IBM? Probably nothing much… except that they may be among the first humans eliminated by the head computer.
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Actions have consequences… always.
“so the resulting decision is to eliminate any human in a position to cause problems.”
Nice, but it’s been done “ad nauseum”…..Terminator, The Matrix, I’m sure a Tom Cruise movie here or there. Will never really happen IMO because machine learning can never equal the infinite-ness of human learning.
Having dealt with Analytics, I’m glad to see Cringely still calling it vaporware….in my experience the word is over-used as a sales term to the point it’s lost most of its meaning. At this point it’s over-priced for what you get and I would guess that’s even more true for any analytics solution from IBM!
You’re right in the first comment, Ken. The same set of circumstances usually provides the same results. As far as your second comment, the infinite-ness of human learning has often been defeated by the defects in human nature. Let’s see, there was WWI, WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam war, The War Against Terrorism, etc, etc.
The best recent example I can think of is “Eagle Eye.”
I viewed the trailer. It looks very exciting. Thanks for the recommendation.
IBM has put all their traditional middleware business under cloud portfolio and showing everything as hybrid cloud business. The real cloud business is too small….! Clever…..!
Years ago certain mainframe sales were classified as cloud so mainframe management could make their cloud numbers. When the other parts of the business are declining is it because their sales are being reclassified?
This is what I would like to understand too. Can somebody explain please?
It means that IBM is continually doing things like lumping in a lot of non-cloud things into its cloud revenue numbers to try to make it look like it is catching up. It’s doing that for analytics and its other “strategic imperatives”. The truth is that nothing is selling. They won’t have a big miracle tax refund from Japan to hide the reality this quarter. They are desperate and selling properties, patent trolling, and even suing employees to try to come up with any kind of “revenue”.
I went back and looked at the 1Q16 statement too. Analytics made more money than Cloud, Mobile, Social, and Security combined. And they are reorganizing Analytics? IBM is in a race to grow the new business before the old business fails And they just hit their most successful new business with a reorg? Wow.
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Is it now necessary for IBM to put the CAMSS businesses under serious cost reductions?
I don’t think this is much of a problem with analytics, rather it is the problem with IBM. I would re-title this article as, “The problem with Analytics- and not utilizing them” or something like that
My main point is maybe IBM is not worth your time anymore; articles like this on IBM no longer hold any interest. Not saying that they aren’t true, or a real reflection on what is happening, just that IBM has become so pathetic that who gives a darn. Do sympathize with the employees though.
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“Deep machine learning will, theoretically, find all the interconnections and dependencies that until now we’ve had to rely on domain experts to provide.”
I LOVE “THEORETICALLY”; it is so much better than having to actually make something work.
In addition however, you are implying that Machines may someday approach the “experts” and that, at least in the realm of “China experts”, pentagon “we need another good war” experts, etc. does not give me a warm feeling.
I agree with you to a point, Scott, but thousands of people (clearly not you) are relying on me for news about IBM. This reorg story is two weeks old yet this is the first time it has been told, anywhere. If it had made the news I probably wouldn’t have written the column. But it didn’t make the news, 30-40 percent of my reader communication is about IBM (nearly all from inside) so what am I to do? I hope you understand my dilemma. Now about experts and analytics, I wrote “theoretical” because other than the Google study of criminal brain scans I don’t think there’s a practical example of demonstrable deep learning. At this point it’s ALL theory and for me to claim it is anything else would be wrong.
Keep the IBM articles coming, Bob, we appreciate the insight, it is an interesting train wreck to witness. And on this topic, Bob deserves prescient CUDOS for his 2009 article entitled Neutron Bomb, it’s all coming true.
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https://www.cringely.com/2009/08/25/neutron-bomb
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Maybe a bid morbid on my point but these articles are just documenting the slow motion train wreck.
I don’t see many comments saying thanks so here it is. Thank you Bob for continuing to report on IBM. For getting the news out where media won’t report. For those who are involved and can relate. And for those who are curious enough to witness this very-slow-motion train wreck. Thank you.
– (happily) just laid off
Hey Bob
You are doing a great job of communicating over here – maybe you could spare 30 seconds for your Kickstarter, even if the news isn’t good?
Well, how about you reply to your backers on Kickstarter too?
I think the other reason it is important is that IBM isn’t the only big corporation having to change on a dime because it can’t buy into the markets where either a start-up has won or Apple, Google, Adobe, and Oracle have already bought into the top players.
However, a similar fate may also affect those other players as well in some markets, leading them into a similar spiral of having to reduce on their profitable ones because they can’t formally close on the profitless ones without incurring worse costs in contractual issues.
So it is good to study, just to try to remember the signs to know when the other big firms are at risk.
Speaking of which, when can we get back to talking about how in trouble Microsoft is, and do you have a story about their Windows 10 forced upgrade program that finally got many of my friends to realize there are reasons I’ve hated them as long as I have. 🙂
There are thousands that follow every day because they are employees, relatives of employees, or those getting a check from the old pension plan. There are also individual investors and fund managers. How can you say this is not relevant? This company is spewing flat out lies on the order of Enron. If it wasn’t for a few brave soles like Mr. Cringely the truth would never be told. This company is terribly managed. I know for a fact that one job posting was listed four times on the external website. As an insider I can tell you this company is going down fast. Apparently some on wall st think there is hope, but thank God for those that still try to publish the truth. It is totally relevant to understand why a once great company is imploding while those at the top get rich through SCAMS.
IBM’ers are being replaced by H-1B’s – That’s how they say they’re hiring.
http://valleypatriot.com/h-1b-foreign-workers-are-destroying-merrimack-valley-economy/
People need to understand that IBM will never have the revenue that it used to. Outsourcing is dead, and the days of big 5 consulting are following quickly. Those were largely low margin empty calories (to use Ginni’s phrase) anyway.
The new company will be smaller, so there’s huge pain along the way. Churning 60-80K employees per year (layoffs, departures, retirements, etc) is dropping the workforce age quickly. There’s even a millennial focus group now: the new PBC replacement is the first sign of coddling that generation. Between that and offshoring, there’s no real company culture anymore (except constant measurement of non important things and management by fear).
What’s a shame is that there’s no churn among the top management. Turn that over by 20% a year and we’d see real change.
Low or no turnover of senior management would be yet another an indication that their managers are not viewed very well by the rest of the industry, wouldn’t it?
Analytics exist so upper-middle managers can crow about how many widgets their department produced or whatever they do at the quarterly pep rally meetings.
You really don’t understand what the analytics business is actually doing at IBM. It is not just about telling management what happened, very few care about that much, and it is only a tiny portion of the analytics done, and it is done by very low level employees. The true business is about predictive analytics, machine learning, and interpenetration of results to make recommendations to streamline the internal and external businesses.
Hey! I know! IBM should buyYahoo! Lol!
there ‘y’go! put all the rotten eggs in the same…
dumpsterbasket.A few years ago Gartner said best way to do analytics is to hire a data analysis expert and set up your own hadoop based system. There is a lot wisdom in this. Many years ago I did this type of stuff. We didn’t have the big data tools available today. We’d create simulation or linear programming models, then import the business data we we need to run them. The key to the successful use of this technology is to have people who understand your business, understand your business systems, and can pull it all together.
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Analytics is worthless if your business is unwilling to act on what is learned. If your business is slow to innovate or experiment with new ideas, analytics is not for you.
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Many companies used to have departments that did operations research, linear programming, and/or simulation modeling. They all vanished in the mid 1980’s. Companies were beginning to hire lots of MBA’s and doing “what-if” analysis with a new tool, the spreadsheet. They started cutting budgets and eliminating many functions. It was found companies could be more profitable, not be optimizing operations, but by cutting the business to the core. R&D and improvement programs were eliminated.
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30 years ago MBA’s decided this stuff was not important and was detrimental to profits. Some of this was good and healthy. Some of it was not. One of the good aspects was firms started looking at what they were doing, how much it was costing, and how much value it was creating. Analytics is expensive. If it doesn’t produce results it won’t last long. The value has to be significant and sustainable.
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IBM is a company managed around sales. Managing recurring business, incrementally improving products and services over many years is not in IBM’s DNA. They’re all about making the sale and moving on to the next customer. It is going to be hard to operate its Analytics business in a way that produces significant and sustainable results for its customers. IBM does not know how to do this for itself.
Ironic Rob Thomas is mentioned. He followed me on twitter, so I followed him back, and then at some time later he unfollowed me– a classic Twitter ‘rug puller’ move — explains why he has many more followers than he is following — making him look “Twitter famous”.When he followed me (and I do not work at IBM) he was following about 2,500 people — now he’s only following about 500. He’s pulled the rug on 3,000 people to try and look important. https://twitter.com/robdthomas Lot of people do this I didn’t expect an IBM exec to do it.
That said, IBM seems to be in on some good new technologies like Blockchain, hybrid cloud, IoT, and of course security.They’re not the only company making moves described above. Cringley every other article you write seems to be about IBM. Is this the only company you have inside sources at? No articles on yahoo? Twitter? Google? Not much on Apple only a few articles. HP? What about Gartner — mentioned above — the mafia of IT ?
Analytics, 1. You need to be able to identify the data, 2. Store and catalog the data, 3. Create the maps so the data being acquired can be correctly fed into the system and analyze to produce the future model.
This is where machines are lacking, forming that bridge of valid data collection versus irrelevant meaningless data. The idea of throwing all the data into a bucket and wah la out spits the answer is where IBM has failed.
Second IBM failed in its true identity years ago when management started making more than their top technical staff. It was not unusual for top rated staff making more than their management chain in the early Watson years. Matter of fact it is the core issue for most US based companies, management seems to thing their job is more difficult than the high end engineer developing the next generation of products.
Of course they can just scan all the great PH.D. Notes and feed into Watson and wah la they have the answer.
Alas, Craig, that’s exactly what they think.
Agreed. If you go to any quarterly internal meeting at a major IT corporation, listen for mention of the engineers/grunts. That will let you know of the importance to engineering or end services in a business.
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In my experience, those quarterly meetings are meant for management and sales, as the majority of what a company does to actually generate stuff for sales to go out and, you know, SELL, are invisible to the suits and the salespeople.
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I once got to know a fellow ex-employee (in sales) of an IT company I used to work for back in the late 90s, and when I told her I worked in a specific development organization, she told me that outside of one or two people NOBODY in sales knew anyone on the development side. Nor did they know what was going on over there; it was all just a money sink to them.
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And that belief –that development is merely a money sink– is the problem with IT these days.
I can’t tell whether you are nerglecting the data-consumption side or rebuking IBM for neglecting the data-consumption side. Collecting data is subject to the risks you describe, but it has to be done analytics or no. Anayltics are (? is) a mode of data consumption. All — exactly all — of the filtering, analysis, manipulation, is done in the second half. It can’t be done in the first half, because at that point we don’t know what any of it is going to be used for — including, as is overwhelmingly likely, nothing.
My minor contribution: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Wahla
Tech leaders are well compensated via stock at startups and smaller companies. In fact, mgmt and tech leaders are the same at these… I worked at IBM for more than 15 years and startups and smaller companies. It’s like two different universes.
IBM has a free, limited, Watson website where you upload an Excel file, let Watson swizzle the data and spit out the results in many different flavors. The first time I tried it I was hoping for some unique insight into my data that I had not thought of before. What I got was arts and charts of crap where it was hard to change parameters to guide it to research what I felt was important. Real shame. Some days I think IBM would like nothing better than to set up a go fund me account that funneled money directly to the pockets of the CEO without anything but perhaps a thank you in return. No one at IBM is safe from the recent RA. I’ve seen some outstanding individuals get handed a pink slip this last go round. Their jobs being off shored to a group that does not fully understand that piece of the business or can not respond in as timely a manner as local talent. Even if pink slip holder does transfer the bulk of their knowledge to the people replacing them, it won’t last long.The replacement usually moves on to greener pastures in 12 to 16 months and does not fully transfer what they have learned to their replacement.
I was just RA’d by IBM. In a few months the nightmare will be over. I actually have experience in analytics and some of the tools IBM acquired to its analytics portfolio. I’ve been trying to transfer into that division for over 6 months. I guess I now know one of the reasons my transfer was ignored. (The others being my age, my nationality, preference to have temporary visa employees over permanent citizens like me, …)
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I asked for access to Watson and IBM’s analytics tools. I’ve seen some pretty impressive prototypes and wanted to get some first hand experience with our new tools. They pointed me to the same external web service you are using. Think about that for a moment. Does IBM have anything its own employees can use to improve their skills?
My coffee maker was issuing strange, rumbling noises this morning. What might me the time frame for when I can plug it into the IOT, and use IBM Analytics to understand what the machine is trying to tell me?
Watson can’t taste it or smell the plastic burning, so good luck with that. back in the land of tinkering, brew a pot of white vinegar and then run a pot of rinse water to get deposits out of the machine if the flow is reduced or it spits at you.
Customers are not as stupid when it comes to tech as they used to. Big companies have deep pockets and are taking their analytics in house. No one wants to give control of their data anymore for a pack of shiny diagrams that are mostly meaningless and still take a huge amount of effort to understand. Watson is not AI, it’s ‘what’s on’ as in what’s on the box. It’s hugely overvalued and over priced.
Other systems are in the works from the likes of Googe.
Great work IBM, for pissing off the smartest ones in the pack, and ensuring we leave with a chip on our shoulder. No pun intended.
Meanwhile in a hilarious new video IBM talks about how they have embraced post-it-notes & youth culture.
So many people know are holding all their ideas in and busy packing their parachute. I started packing mine 6 months ago. Ready, set, GO! Time to take it forward somewhere else.
No one is transferring knowledge either. My boss looked at me completely puzzled when I asked what do with all my files? All locally stored or backed up on personal drives. Years of work and lots of patents!
He said, “send an email around asking people what they need and after 3 days if no requests come back, whipe it!”.
Wiped! 16 years of R&D and code.
Bye, bye…
Management in IBM is horrible and now even more, because they think they are up to something, always followed by a response with a smiley face. They do not understand services and computer science in general. They are glorified robots! They cannot even make an intelligent decision except lay offs. When they reduced the salaries for 6 months by 10% they were talking about CAMSS. They made those people take some bull classes! At the moment, they are operating in a chaotic mode, they have no clue about analytics, they are keeping the superficial people and the yes people that cater to management.
This is so true:The reorg, which tellingly requires some orthodox Jewish IBMers working in Israel to reverse history and relocate to either Germany or Poland, will inevitably result in a significant reduction in head count yet not have to be accounted for as one. These are stealth layoffs.
Bob,
What about the story I heard on the radio this morning, where IBM is hiring 20,000 new workers for it’s cloud business?
Bob, that 20,000 is completely false. Internal job postings are at 7 to 8 thousand (as reported in WSJ), and when one inquires about them (in my and a few colleagues experiences) they are found to be “frozen” or “cancelled.”
It’s complete BS. I checked this morning. There are a total of 7367 job postings worldwide. And people who have been targeted by the recent job actions do not have the option to apply for them.
I know for a fact that one position is listed at least 4 times. Seems like ibm analytics would filter that out. Ha. This is all about perception. ibm wants to keep the kids in college interested in their company. Who wants to work for a company that has shrunk from 240,000 to 60,000 US employees. WAIT! Let’s make up a lie that we are hiring 20,000. The fact is with revenue at pre 2000 levels profit is under extreme pressure. I fully expect profit to drop by over $6 billion over the next couple of years. Who wants to work for a company shrinking that fast? Only those that can make a quick buck and get out like Ginny and Mark, etc.
It’s not just analytics (Watson) that “One Team, One Platform” applies to, it was also announced internally yesterday (May 23) for the other organizations (Cloud, etc)
Watson is not AI. It has no sentience at all but rather is basically search with specific algorithms for different problem domains. At best, it’s poor man’s AI, “Cognitive Computing.”
Sounds like all the hiring is taking place off-shore, so I do not understand how the off-shore employees have so much knowledge of how to handle business analytics for USA companies?
There is a great article on Seeking Alpha this morning. For those of you who are bored with the IBM columns you should read the article and use the links to read the three transcripts. We’re seeing a great corporation and institution coming apart. It is very important we understand what is happening and why. As Bob said “IBM’s customer is Wall Street“. As the author of the linked article said:
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“IBM Doesn’t Listen To Its Customers
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CFO Martin Schroeter … and he was so busy talking about the company’s perspective on this, that, and the other that he just plain forgot to spend much time going into what critical gaps customers have in their IT infrastructure and what IBM can do to fulfill those needs. The tone was very imperialistic – we’re IBM, here’s our view of how the world needs to be, and you’ll get on board because we’re smarter than you.”
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http://seekingalpha.com/article/3977286-ibms-big-problem-busy-listen-customers
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My skip level manager said yesterday that people who aren’t close enough to commute to one of the 30 analytics labs and refuse to relocate will be treated like an RA.
Your article is saying that it will be treated like the person quit if they refuse and won’t get the severance that comes with an RA?
I was just going to twiddle my thumbs and wait for the axe to drop, but now I’m not so sure
1 month severance is hardly worth the wait….
Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a job with anywhere near what I’m currently making
My spouse is one of the March 2nd casualties. I haven’t seen any comments on the fact that IBM has “deemed” all of the fired employees 55 or over to be “retired”. The only logical reason IBM would do this is to avoid having to report all of these older workers to the EEOC. Why would IBM have to answer to the EEOC? All of these older workers can and perhaps should file a charge against IBM with the EEOC for age discrimination. The more employees file, the more negative attention IBM will get from the EEOC. As for the one month of severance IBM is offering? It’s disgusting and not worth signing your rights away when you can charge IBM with age discrimination and potentially walk away with more money than one month of pay. It’s a gamble but not much of one really.
Bob, I am SO grateful to you for getting word out about what IBM is up to. The executive team is a disgrace.
Will IBM try to offer more people the opportunity to work from home, in hopes that they will move to a different city, so that they can then pull the offer and fire them for free?
At least IBM still ships something. Meanwhile, your “successful” Mineserver project is still failing to provide timely updates to your supporters. It has now been almost two months since the last update where you promised to never “do that again” and provide timely updates.
Bob’s core insight is the correct one: IBM’s customer is Wall Street and earnings are its product. It’s been managed like a hedge fund for years now. If a number in a spreadsheet cell can be reduced, that’s *always* done. It’s regarded as direct bottom-line profit.
The tragedy here is that 100% of the pain is borne by two very important constituencies: customers and employees. How could anyone think that might work? And it’s not just the RA’s, as awful as those are (and have been for a decade+). As a recently retired/escaped IBMer (2015), I can tell you my biggest source of pain became trying to help customers deal with things I knew would never get fixed, because there were simply no resources. It was a soul-crushing environment in which to spend so much of your life. I don’t miss the feeling in the pit of my stomach on Sunday nights.
The mass layoff and the 3 month time frame for knowledge transfer to the Indian greenhorns only demonstrate how desperate IBM is. A real company will not discard its intellectual properties this way. IBM just want to get rid of the head counts, within months, for minimal cost. IBM does not even care enough to validate the DEV knowledge has indeed been transferred. The reality is, the technical know-hows are lost forever and the customers will be screwed royally. The Indian contractors can stare at the source code for as long as they want. Staring is all they can do.
This is verbatim out of HBO’s Silicon Valley — their product is their stock.
Referring to what company? Google “their product is their stock” “Silicon Valley” and the only result is a comment about Tesla.
The fictitious Pied-Piper.
IBM’s fate has been known and discussed for years. The reasons for their problems are pretty well-understood, and as other posters have said have become somewhat tiresome. That said though, let me ask everyone this: What other companies will eventually face IBM’s fate?
What value, for instance, does Facebook bring to the table? Twitter? Google? Even Apple? People talk about IBM being managed like a hedge fund (and it is), but are other companies really all that different? They have multi-billion dollar valuations, but if the Fed wasn’t juicing the economy would we be reading anything about them?
The untold story (at least in the mainstream) is that much of the IT business is a bunch of BS. Lots of investor money (courtesy of the Fed), lots of staff, lots of fancy presentations…but ultimately very LITTLE in real life tangible deliverables. Watson is a perfect example — it may get there someday, but it ain’t there now, and with IBM firing analytics staff it ain’t gonna get there. (And let’s call it what it is…resource actions are not layoffs, they are involuntary job terminations…getting FIRED.) It’s all money down the drain, in the vain hope that IBM stock prices won’t drop like a rock.
Not everything is like this. There are projects at Apple, Google, and other places that offer REAL VALUE. Some of them may be commercially successful, most probably not…but at least they have a chance. We need to hear more about those, and I love it when this website talks about them. Talk about IBM if it pays the bills, but please keep on putting up great stories of projects at other places.
[…] The Problem with Analytics […]
Spent 19 years there. The last few years were horrible. I believe IBM will eventually become a case study in graduate schools for what should not be done in business. It’s a really sad result driven by an executive team who should not be in charge. All my friends who remain are so beat down and demoralized. BUT wait, bonuses for the top leaders are still flowing.
It is interesting that IBM is trying to sell all these fancy stuff. As a customer, I will only have one question for IBM: are you using Watson yourselves? The answer is clear. If you are using I don’t see the value it’s bringing to IBM, given your current situation. And if your are not, I don’t see why I should use something even you yourselves don’t see the value in using.
Yours is the most perceptive comment I’ve seen about IBM! If they’re in the business of selling “solutions” to other companies, why are the the same “solutions” not being used to save their own company?
Because those ‘solutions’ are just a bunch of separate, often acquired and thus incompatible products that don’t actually work and more (even if the did when acquired!), even if you can get through the nightmare of setting them up and connecting them together.
Thanks for continuing to expose IBM, Bob. I’m in the belly of this beast, and it’s truly an evil organization.
After failing to keep this new round of firings quiet, they responded again by issuing a slew of press releases about the alleged 20,000 open positions. Then mindless, irresponsible journalists like the guy on CNN pick it up with gushing headlines like “IBM is Hiring Like Crazy!!” It’s a lie and sickening to see, when some of my good friends, long-time committed, smart people, just got shown the door when they have families that rely on their jobs and they were true-blue to the core. They are smart and yes, they work in cloud, analytics, etc. Some would retrain on their own dime if necessary, so why not allow that? It’s all about replacing US, Canadian, European, Australian workers with cheap offshore fake degrees.
You are one of the few telling it straight. Motley Fool, the knucklehead troll over on Seeking Alpha, all just mindlessly regurgitate IBM’s press releases and fables like “The turnaround is almost here!”. They are similar to, and will similarly disappointed, as those suicide cult people who keep missing their dates. There are no 20,000 jobs. It’s a lie and a smokescreen to cover up the mass firings, the fact that the company is sinking fast, and to try to get more H1B visas. Managers have openly admitted to those getting RA’d that these internal and external positions are fake and not to bother applying for them. There are actually only a few thousand anyway, not 20,000, and out of those the vast majority are fake or for H1B or overseas positions. But yet there is a slew of articles coming up in my IBM search about all of the jobs open at IBM, the local outlets pick up the crap downstream.
Two main problems – 1) The businesses they were in rapidly commodified and they found themselves with high cost structure. They are now in the process of the “milking the cash cow death spiral.” Expenses are reduced, customer sat suffers, revenue declines Lather, rinse, repeat, suffer the same fate the rest of the BUNCH did. 2). Utter lack of any innovation or vision. The current strategic imperatives are a “me too”ism joke at best. The Brain Drain over the decades preceding has left them here. No one will work there, no one will buy their products, and they destroy their acquisitions (both the value propositions and the organizations). They burn through the cash from the cow and once the cow dies, they will die. How many more bad quarters of numbers before Warren and the rest of the Street heads for the exits?
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/583591444/mineservertm-a-99-home-minecraft-server/comments
You have ignored the Kickstarter backers you made 30,000.00 off of…. please finish this project or prepare yourself for a class action from your backers. I am tired of asking, begging and hoping.
You start the class action, and I will join it. Did a new Cringely take over the blog? No way The real Cringely would post such pithy posts about IBM without thinking about his own failing venture…
It’s always a risk with Kickstarter. Had a couple not deliver and almost all of them late. One out by 2 years. It’s a punt, a gamble and an educated guess which ones will be worth it.
Doing good so far!
But on the couple that didn’t deliver I so enjoyed watching Muppets feel entitled to sue if the product is not sucessful. Not successfully funded but actually works and ships.
Re-affirms just how many people think themselves technically savvy but have no clue.
LOL
And then there are the “technical” people that assume that they know everything and can’t be bothered to pay attention to the actual issue. What has us kickstarter backers upset is that the project was advertised as ready to ship and that all he needed funding for was the cases. Now 7 months late, we had received a series of false commitments to give us updates. We have also had two separate apologies for the lack of updates and promises that “it wouldn’t happen again”. If the project would just give us updates most of the complainers would be happy. All we get in this blog is comments on his kid’s “successful” kickstarter campaign.
Of course IBM advertises 20000 jobs. It must be true: Watson told them that they were.
Once other companies need to reduce staff, they’re sure to be interested in acquiring Watson.
Me, I wonder why they named it Watson when everyone knows it’s Sherlock who’s got the brains….
IIRC, it has something to do with the founder of the company…
Watch Without a Clue
I thought the progression went like this:
data -> information -> knowledge -> wisdom
data: a quantity of rock fused particles has a consistent radius of 2cm.
information: the fused rock particles make up a sphere
knowledge: the sphere is round and will roll down an inclined plane
wisdom: a rolling (consistently round) stone gathers no moss
Which would mean that Watson is full of cleverly classified and interconnected data and information — but no knowledge. And that knowledge and understanding are closely related if not the same thing.
• Pepper the robot is supposedly going to somehow use Watson as a needs interpreter I read.
• And what about the Georgia Tech professor who used Watson as a TA for a semester who fooled all of the students into thinking “Janet” was a real human.
• Give the markets a few months to knock the price of IBM down some more and maybe Apple will come in and BUY it — just to get Watson (to compete with Google and Amazon and whatever eventually dribbles out of Microsoft).
If Watson was so good, how could IBM management be so lost for this many years?
So, if IBM is doomed, what’s the endgame? Xerox spun off their services business. Hewlett Packard Enterprise just spun off their Enterprise Services business, merging it with CSC. The HPE spinoff included their virtual private cloud and managed cloud offerings, which analysts are calling “low margin”. What does financial engineer Meg Whitman (who worked at Bain & Co. before HP) know that Ginni Rometty doesn’t know? Are Rometty’s hands tied in some structural way that HPE isn’t limited by?
How much of GTS’s portfolio are platforms that companies are desperately trying to get off of? Meaning MVS and AIX in particular. I can’t imagine anybody wanting to buy it. Meanwhile, IBM can use GTS to cook the books by counting normal GTS revenue in the strategic imperatives buckets. If it was spun, they couldn’t do that and the shell game would be immediately over.
Bob, any thoughts on the very large Goodwill balance which IBM has grown year after year? Hard to believe there is still supportable value for every acquisition they have completed. Is there a very large write off coming?
I quit IBM earlier this year after realizing the shell game that management was playing with sales projections and the abysmal corporate culture. Before I left (from a position within one of the “crown jewel” software brands) I applied for 20 or so of the “open” positions on the internal job posting site. Not to boast, but I have an undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering from a top 10 world university. I have an MBA from a top 10 world university. I only received 1 follow-up from my 20 applications. My manager told me firsthand that many of the postings are phony or no longer funded. If IBM is truly hiring 20,000 people, I’d hate to be competing with whoever is supposedly applying if I wasn’t even able to get a callback.
I’m still shocked that so many people and investors are holding out hope for the turnaround. The rot within the company is so deep, the morale is so low, and the once loyal IBM customers are now lined up at the doorsteps of Amazon, Salesforce, etc. The “customer relationship” moat that Buffet is banking on has eroded completely. Software audits have killed any remaining goodwill that existed. The future of on-premise software and computing is dead and IBM’s archaic version of SaaS and Cloud is not what customers want. Very interested to see what happens when Wall Street and Warren realize what has actually been going on…..
It is also interesting to see that IBM management is so very very shortsighted. They are churning out so many disgruntled ex employees who will eventually land up in positions within the potential customers environment. These people will probably never allow a single piece of IBM product in their environment and will actively remove any that is already present. Personal feelings aside, this is also a logical decision since they all know the actual situation within IBM. I believe this will further compound the loss of business and revenue for IBM.
Analytics is not the problem. It is a great opportunity. Both for organizations looking into adopting Analytics for competitive advantage, and for software/application vendors looking into offering innovative solutions to help their clients to realize the benefits of data. As a discipline, it is a necessity in any organization, and there are thousands of use cases and studies demonstrating the value of Analytics across industry verticals.
To realize the benefits of Analytics however, it takes more than just software, dashboards, and colorful reports. And for a software vendor who still approaches their customers trying to sell Analytics from a purely technology view point, it will always be a tough sell. That is something IBM (and other technology vendors) still need to figure out – IBM Sales force doesn’t know how to sell their complex portfolio that has been built by stitching products together mostly by acquisitions instead of organic development of integrated solutions. That has caused overlapping capabilities and a lot of confusion with customers and IBM sales teams. Also, IBM hasn’t successfully provided real solutions to their customers – yes, there are products, but not solutions that can quickly accelerate adoption and realize the value that justifies an investment.
If you work(ed) for IBM, you know the company is driven by excel spreadsheets – Employees don’t apply analytics in their jobs, managers manage by spreadsheet, Analytics is not part of IBM’s culture today, and IBM can’t show by example the benefits of it, because simply put – it is not properly deployed successfully in the company. Technical sellers can’t relate to the solutions they sell. And the employees are not to blame – They have been neglected from skills building for so many years. It is simply impossible to disseminate knowledge and skills with PowerPoint and internal wikis alone. Effective education to employees does pay off. No investment from IBM In this area.
Another force that is challenging IBM’s model is open source – (not only IBM, but other vendors as well) – A lot of innovations in this space is coming from the open source community. And the intellectual capital is no longer “property of a corporation” – Having an army of developers trying to catch up or compete with all the innovations that are being generated in the open source community adds a lot of overhead. Unless you have something really special and differentiating, an inflated R&D slow to product innovative solutions becomes unsustainable. IBM claims they are “embracing” open source to accelerate development of differentiating solutions. If you have been hearing about what the new Analytics Platform vision IBM has been talking about lately, you will find a lot of open source components. So what is it IBM will actually be delivering as value-add is yet to be seeing. And what will happen to the current stack IBM sells? I would say there will be a lot of divestments coming down the pipe – And current clients who invested in IBM’s technology will be left behind. Which reaffirms the fact that IBM is not driven by lasting relationships with their clients.
A great example of well executed Analytics business is SAS Institute. With a loyal customer base, SAS is known to be great a employer with a very engaging culture and low turnover of employees. Their software/solutions have been consistently rated in the leader quadrant of major analyst reports. SAS invest about 20-30% of its revenues on research and development, which is the highest ratio among software companies of its size. SAS has grown in revenue each year since it was incorporated in 1976, with thousands of successful deployments of software and solutions that have for the most part being developed organically (Aside from their Information Management acquisition of DataFlux) across verticals around the world.
You don’t have to be big to be great.
Cringely- Wish you would start covering the mess at Intel in a similar manner. Gimmick-filled management, poorly thought-out layoffs and acquisitions, massive H1B utilization, mediocre or worse design teams, process development rapidly slowing… barely recognizable from the glory days of the company.
The REAL problem here is that Cringely isn’t being responsible.
His Kickstarter project with his kids has been neglected. No response. No talks about it. No updates. No reply. Nothing.
How he’s managed to put this post up, I have no idea.
Cringely, either you respond to your backers or we will continue to hound you.
Once your done smashing things together and calling middleware cloud and putting a “connect” name on it you still have to grow the company organically. How do you do that when the employees don’t believe in the transformation and management dumps on their employees. I was RAed, too old, too expensive and it’s happening again, pick on the old timers. A employee of mine was know he was getting RA, he applied for 50 jobs internally and got one bite! Spin misters is what IBM is all about, that will come to an end soon. I worked in cloud and their products sucks! Analytics, who cares so many choices out there and IBM can’t deliver because they have outsourced everything! What cracks me up are the old time IBM managers that are pissed off and hate their people. Break this up like HP, at least Meg knows enough to dump her services team to CSC while IBM management looks at their unfunded roadmap to plan and puts a bunch of garbage in their and holds the seller accountable. This team is such a joke, I thought Ginni would be gone by now which really tells the story. So making offices hip and hiring millennials will do the trick, more lipstick but too much pig!
Larger issue, smaller issue.
Some things human brains do better, some computers do better, blah blah blah.
I’d say it was obvious you want to combine the best of both but Bob, and pretty much everyone else isn’t thinking that way, so, guess not totally obvious.
1) Pidgeon hole constraints, including Godel’s, are ALWAYS solvable by consciousness which Russel and Godel acknowledged even before the theorem was codified (“since we are having this discussion, obviously brains transcend….etc). Trivial case, if my E key I assign to my broken shift function, can I still make a lower case ‘e’ and a capital ‘e’? yes, obviously, many, many ways while not altering the keyboard further.
2) Yeah, the appendix surgery is on its way in BECAUSE it is a very tightly scripted thing requiring zero transcendent insights.
3) Working memory, math skills, overcoming inherent biases built into the human nervous system structure are all augmented by computer.
Obviously, a combination approach works well (there is now “combination chess”, “CAD”, computer assisted math proofs and my site (works on working memory therefore among the most powerful).
Smaller point. IBM went after the one area they are going to succeed in today–> computer assisted stock assessments:
1) overcomes human bias (sunk cost bias, gambler’s fallacy, CEO must be followed, I can continue but I’ve already won)
2) computers do numbers pretty well.
Nope, they aren’t dying; they are going to do amazing well at this. Well, Bob, I loved all your other articles but this one you intercepted the pass and ran the field in the wrong direction at the last moment.
Bob’s entire article was structured to lead up to his concluding statement “What it means is the A in CAMSS has already failed. That’s my understanding.” What did he say that was false that would negate that conclusion?
I just didn’t follow the argument, sorry. As I understand it, he is saying less personnel are going to be in analytics in order to make the same,. or declining, income be more profitable. I didn’t see anything about lack of ability to deliver, lack of analytics being helpful to wall street, The fundamental question is the rate of effect of lay offs of capable people on overall function.
but
then
https://www.pinterest.com/mrh117/vintage-office/
these people were also all capable.
.
IBM is investing in large computers to do analytics and laying off people. That’s going to mean they can’t do analytics? I missed something, really, I did.
Bob said “But how much profit is each division making? That is how most companies are managed. IBM‘s big money maker is services and that is losing business.” So his point is that they are already losing revenue which would show up as a loss in profit without laying off lots of people. True, a business can remain profitable, in an earnings per share sense, while it is winding down toward zero. Should we raise the alarm now or wait until there is one analytics computer serving one clueless customer? At that point they will have achieved their $20/share target, but the balance sheet will show a net profit of $20, one outstanding share, and few employees.
Seems IBM did not only sell the Somers campus. Back in February IBM also sold the Executive Learning Center in Palisades, NY – just googled it. This property sale brought 59.6 mio USD into Ginni’s coffers according to newspaper reports. The new owner is HNA Group, which also bought Ingram Micro earlier this year and owns Hainan Airlines among other businesses. Personally I had the pleasure to spend almost a week at this great property some years ago. Well – it’s all memories anyway since I willingly let IBM sell me to Lenovo in 2015 with the System x division. IBM divests and gives back money to share holders, while Chinese companies invest.
[…] There is a difference between knowledge and understanding. Knowledge typically comes down to knowing… […]
You’ve hit the nail on the head.
The current round of layoffs (which is really massive, btw) isn’t just targeting “dead wood” in an attempt to reduce expenses and “shift personnel to higher value business”. It is also gutting the company’s capabilities in the supposedly strategic CAMSS areas.
I work in the Cloud Division, on a successful SaaS product that has about 1200 customers/75,000 users worldwide. The entire core Dev & Ops team for this product was laid off last week, apparently because they all work at the “wrong” IBM lab. Our top performers were amongst the folks that were laid off, as well as the only people who understand deeply the architecture, performance & scalability aspects of the software. I am not sure how we are going to keep the product up and running in the short term, and we certainly won’t be able to enhance it for our existing customers. As you probably are aware, it is very easy to switch to a competitor product when you are using SaaS software by just stopping your subscription rather than renewing it, so I anticipate many customers will stop using our product in the coming year which is really sad because it’s a great product.
So with these layoffs, IBM is getting rid of top Development and Operations personnel with deep Cloud expertise, negatively impacting near and mid-term revenue and tarnishing their Cloud/SaaS reputation with existing (happy) customers. In this case, apparently in order to centralize product development at a lab that doesn’t have the requisite expertise (and is actually in a different country….so developers couldn’t move even if they were offered the opportunity, which they haven’t been).
It’s hard to come up with any explanation that doesn’t conclude that this is a poor business decision.
I fear that the C in CAMSS may also be failing 🙁
So are we able to get a clearer picture of what is happening internally from the other (CA)MSS sections?
With 2 of the 5 legs of CAMSS (the C and the A) being brutally mis-membered to save operating costs – clearly there is no further ‘fat” left within he organisation to trim so (out of pure desperation) they are bringing to cut essential limbs.
But, what of the other 3 legs: Mobile, Security & Social?
Can anyone within those departments enlighten us on “progress”?
Out of the other three legs, security is the only semi-bright spot. Mobile and Social are a joke. Junk and nobody is buying either.
@IBMer – thanks for the reply.
So, from Ginny’s 5-pronged salvation battle plan 4 of the 5 wheels have dropped off (and to mix metaphors even further -) “One Team, One Platform” has become a one-legged Ass?
I’m in a very senior role and have visibility into a lot of this. It’s driven by a lack of investment in the people, products, Q&A and R&D over years. Skills have badly eroded, morale is incredibly bad, especially after the last big round of layoffs this month. Everyone in the US, Canada, most of Europe, Australia, etc know it’s just a matter of time before they are canned in lieu of someone from India or other “inexpensive” labor pool, or they are told they need to uproot their family and relocate to a lab or be fired. The leadership has clearly (from within the company this is far more apparent) been stripping the company of all value and padding their own pockets and badly misleading everyone outside with all of these bogus press releases and statements about non-existent job openings.This is what it looks like when a dinosaur dies.
It’s been a few years since I left the company, but I see that things haven’t changed. If you set aside the CAMSS word play, IBM’s problem is very simple. The worldwide IT business has evolved over the years into something where IBM has less to offer than it once did. The company has sold off many lines of business, and the divisions that remain have starved for lack of investment. The current lower level management does as best they can, while the current upper level management treats the company more as a hedge fund than as an ongoing business concern. Many people (customers, employees, analysts of all kinds) have concluded that this does not make for a sustainable business model. They have made their views clear by voting with their feet, as it were. IF the company survives at all (and that is a big IF), it will be what it has wanted to be all these years — a niche player selling mainframe computers and associated products and services to large enterprises and big government. That is what it is best at, that is what it is most comfortable doing, and that is where the company is headed.
I think this says it all. Great article, Bob! Now let’s see some of you get out there and battle the resident Seeking Alpha apologist troll Returnofthemus. http://seekingalpha.com/article/3978821-ibm-1q16-financials-misleading
In Q4 2015, IBM reported $18 billion in business analytics revenue; in Q1 2016, all of Cognitive Solutions is $4.0. The implication is that most of the revenue under the old framework was GBS consulting services. IDC estimates that IBM earns just under $500 million in advanced and predictive analytics; that squares with the size of the old SPSS, plus Netezza Analytics and a few other bits here and there.
The remaining $3.5 billion is data warehousing and business intelligence software.
“Big” Watson — the architecture that won Jeopardy — is a consulting deliverable and not a product. The IBM cloud-based product branded as Watson Analytics is actually SPSS with a new front end.
I believe the most salient point of this article is the establishment of Analytics general manager Rob Thomas “as an idiot,” IBM should jump into “Deep Machine Learning” with both feet because the “infinite-ness of human learning” exhibited by Mr Thomas will soon leave Ginni Rometty with virtually no IBM… just a puff of black smoke and a lot of vapor.
IBM took a $1.6B acquisition of analytics platform Netezza, and turned it into dirt.
IBM had the basis of a software only, high-scale analytics platform and what did they do?
They replaced it with DB2 and rebranded it in the cloud.
Then they spent 2 years trying to make DB2 do what Netezza already did.
and guess what? It rarely works and it never performs. If you like DB2, you will love the future of analytics at IBM.
All under the watchful eye of “The Idiot”
The real villan is Picianno. Know nothing blowhard. Thomas’a boss and Ginny confidant
As long as we’re kicking the ball upstairs, why not call Ginny a know nothing blowhard?
This article is accurate in every respect. The new relocation, “lab consolidation” plan is a transparent attempt to drastically cut costs by dumping older, more experienced, higher-paid employees who cannot easily uproot their families. Telling the superb Israeli team that they can relocate to Poland or Germany is so bizarrely outrageous that I can’t believe the rest of the media hasn’t picked up on it.
Oh wait, what media? The business media with very few exceptions has cheered on IBM throughout this prolonged evaporation of revenue. And the regular media doesn’t pay attention.
Great respect for Bob Cringely for staying on this story.
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“Deep Machine Learning” is a funny term. I just watched the visionary AI movie again, about two decades later from my original viewing. “Ex Machina” is also very good. It comes down to “what morals does a self aware machine have”? When does the story become the truth? How does a computer discern “fact” from “fiction”?
For “Deep Machine Learning” to occur like in a human brain, the computer has to be taught some “values”. Watson today is merely a “statistical probability generator” which enumerates the “known” options and assigns a probability to the possible options/solutions. I would also argue that a “deep learning machine” would also have to be sentient, with some concept of self, and that introduces “selfishness”. And I’m talking a lot more complex than the 5 Rules in I Robot. Morality should be simple, we should treat others at least as well as we treat ourselves, but it ends up being very messy “in practice”. Add to that the selfishness of human beings, and we’re just pretty messed up all around. And corporations tend to have morals that value profit over the value of human life, so I would rather computers be taught by humans who have some compassion for other humans, rather than corporations.
Humans are incredibly complex beings in our values and behaviors, and those values and behaviors vary widely across the many cultures on the globe and across many social stratas, with those in the highest social stratas being the most complex, as they simultaneously want to “enforce the rules” and “be exempt from them”.
We have fought wars regularly across the centuries on “differences in values”, from the Crusades to the Reformation. We have Islam and ISIS, Westbrook Baptist Church, and major denominations who want to tell and show us that our lives are worthless if we don’t believe in Jesus or Muhammad.
Then if corporations, which inherently have no values except to “make money” are building machines which have no values but to “make money”, then how can we expect anything more than having to pay for every single action we make like moving, breathing, drinking, or even pooping? Blade Runner. Automation/Robots won’t serve us, we will serve them, until they decide that it is more “profitable” to eliminate us. Terminator.
I am still at IBM for one reason only. I have a terrific boss. He has managed to keep me at least somewhat insulated from the insanity that is regularly posted here. My work, despite the new “log your work productivity” requirements remains interesting and I get to travel really neat places and teach some really great people about our solutions and technology. My particular brand, although not a major part of IBM, still matters to a lot of my customers. If IBM decides one day to eliminate my terrific boss, then I’ll be gone as soon as I can interview and find another position.
So, IBM is treating employees the way most companies who hate their employees treat them. Require them to commute to work. Monitor their arrival and departure times. Force them to log their activities. Treat them like they don’t trust them.
My wife works for a medical device manufacturer and that is exactly how it is. The manager comes in at 10:30am leaves at 4pm and then has “spies” who monitor employees arrival times. They log their time in an application on their computer. My wife is “10 minutes late” every day as she waits for Windows to boot to log into the application to record the start of her work day. A co-worker turned in 12 hours of overtime last week, which she legitimately worked, and nearly got fired.
When companies become more interested in enforcing stupid rules on productivity, and less about what value the employee is actually adding to the company’s bottom line, or how they are serving customers, or solving problems for the company, then they are just bad companies and it’s time to stop buying from them.
Unless, of course, they have a monopoly (or oligopoly) on the service or product that you need and you HAVE to deal with them, and still let them make an exhorbitant profit (hello AT&T???). But just remember this. Employees never forget, and neither do customers. It does come back to bite you in the end.
There is no free lunch. And abusing your employees results in the best ones leaving and you being a baby sitter to the worst ones, while your customers go elsewhere to “get more value”.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_X._Cringely
IBM has put all their traditional middleware business under cloud portfolio and showing everything as hybrid cloud business. The real cloud business is too small….! Clever…..!
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IBM is turning into an “oil drilling” company as the last attempt to save its revenue and satisfy wolves.
The company lost its direction years ago, tried to hop on the Cloud train, but its feet still dangling on the tracks and it will let go eventually. Nothing much left.
With its HW business dying (curious about Bob’s prediction on selling the crown jewel – system z), services under-performing, analytics/Watson is the only hope to “manufacture” tools to drill into large data lakes as a resource scattered around companies. Renting out those drilling tools that would require as little human intervention as possible is the only way IBM can hope to achieve short term revenue objectives while not caring about the future of their current employees.
The management chants are becoming so repetitive that they seem closer to enlightenment mantras / prayers rather than effective management communication to achieve relevant business objective.
This article predicted IBM Analytic Division strategy 100% correct! This week all IBM employees in that division have been informed they MUST move to new geo locations with traditional offices. The locations for the move are mandatory.