This came in today from an IBM customer. Sure enough, as of this morning he’s correct:
This morning I needed to check to see if one of IBM’s products would run on a particular version of an operating system. I went out the IBM U.S. website to look. I can’t find the product. I can’t find a lot of IBM products. Where are the servers? Where are the software products? Where are the storage products? Wow, its all gone or at least well hidden. The website has been completely replaced and only the CAMSS stuff is there.
Where, indeed, are the mainframes?
IBM is a completely sales-centric business. It is really all about what IBM can “sell,” especially the new stuff I’ve been told by IBMers that there have been occasions when they tried to sell to a customer an IBM product or service only to find out they couldn’t: the company was still making the product or providing the service but had decided not to sell any more so the products and services just disappear.
Much of what we think of as the IBM product line has disappeared from its U.S. website. This either indicates an epic screwup from IBM’s web team or an indication that the company no longer cares about most of their existing revenue.
I am still trying to figure out why I need to contact a salesman to find out how much SPSS costs now that IBM has purchased it — unless you’re a student — in which case it’s cheap for just long enough to get you hooked. Then you’d better get a full time job just for the license fee.
This reminds me very much of the time we moved into our current house. When we moved, I naturally went online to see what cable/satellite options we had: the prices, channel offerings, internet capability, and whatnot.
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We went to the satellite providers first, who had all of the data present on the web for easy examination. But going to the cable company, that was an entirely different experience. At the time, the local cable company –Time Warner– had no specific information on their website AT ALL. We were advised to contact a customer service representative and they’d provide us all of the information we’d need to get started.
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I laughed derisively, said a few choice words out loud which turned a few heads –I was eating lunch at my desk so my coworkers were curious as to what set me off– and signed up for satellite service (and a local telco for DSL). I’ve never been tempted by Time Warner since.
And the reason you’re not using PSPP is?
I have to disagree with IBM being a ‘sales centric’ business. If that were the case, the website would be full of products they actually sell (like mainframe). Sales people want transactions, this quarter, not ethereal announcements about futures. IBM is a consultant centric company. Big pitch, with delivery to be figured out after the fact.
Btw, the products like MF are still on the website. You just have to dig for them under IT infrastructure. Agree though, this website is not likely to help anyone looking for a specific piece of information.
I think I see what you mean, Bob. You have this negative connotation of sales centric. When I think sales centric, I think customer centric… do whatever you need to do to make the customer happy and get the deal. I think the phrase you are looking for is “marketing centric”. That is certainly true at IBM. There is a huge gulf between marketing and sales. At IBM, the sales people would be saying, we need to do some events and ads around the new z12 release (or something else specific to a product or event) to inform customers of the benefits and make them aware we will be discussing it with them. The marketers would then say ‘oh no no no… we don’t focus on products, we to market visions of the future’ and then release some ad about solving the world’s traffic problems or something that resonates with no customers…. That is how you get a situation where you can ask the average guy, or even average IT executive, have you heard of IBM? They look at you incredously like you think they are an idiot ” Of course I have heard of IBM!”. Name one of their products? “… silence and thinking”. IBM misses out on so many storage, database (other core products) opportunities because customers just don’t think IBM does that anymore. They think IBM is some sort of smarter planet company now. IBM’s marketing thinks because they get high brand recognition scores that means something. Everyone on the planet has heard of IBM and probably has a generally positive impression of the brand. The problem is that the only people who matter to IBM are a few thousand IT executives and they don’t know what IBM does… some sort of consulting company. This isn’t Apple with five products and five billion possible customers. At Apple you can focus on ambiguous high level concept branding because everyone knows it means ‘buy an iPhone/iPad’. At IBM when people see those ads, they have no idea what IBM wants them to do. They see Oracle they think database (and some other stuff which they probably won’t buy). They see EMC and they think storage (and some other stuff which they probably won’t buy). Cisco is networking (and some other stuff which they probably won’t buy). HPE is servers. IBM is…. Cognitive? I don’t think we have cognitive budgeted this year.
“Selling tries to get the customer to want what you have. Marketing tries to have what the customer wants.” -Buck Rodgers
http://i.imgur.com/GdvtdOg.png
That distinction, often made, may just be another sales tactic. I wonder which Buck Rogers said it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Rogers_(disambiguation)
Not sure of the relevance. IBM marketing doesn’t try to have what the customers want or sell the customers what IBM has. They indulge themselves with these abstract ads and campaigns which no one understands, at absolutely enormous expense. Before cognitive computing, it was ‘Lets build a Smarter Planet’… whatever that means.
I was more “successful”. I followed the Products link N-teen pages down, under Discover. Then picked View all IBM Software, and to see how well they manage their own infrastructure, clicked on IT service management, which pointed me to the following URL and the description shown below explained all about IBM in 2016!
—
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, iga.webmaster@us.ibm.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
—
I’m not planning on contacting iga.webmaster or anyone else and I’m sure we all know why
“anything you might have done that may have caused the error”
what happened to the customer is always right…
They are probably asking what you clicked on at their website, just before the error.
You would be amazed at how frequently this message is encountered on the inside!
Here’s the Mainframe link… took about a second (via Google) to find it: https://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/
(so it’s not hiding!)…
Generally speaking though it can be difficult to find the stuff you are looking for if you are navigating within the IBM web site(s). It’s actually easier to use Google and just include the site name:
e.g. a search for the “IEFBR14” module would look like this: IEFBR14 site:ibm.com
Given IBM tends to change URL’s on things more often than I change socks I find this to be a pretty reliable method of finding things (YMMV).
Yeah I thought so. Bob tends to shout “the sky is falling” about IBM pretty frequently. I don’t see them abandoning the mainframe business, just abandoning a web link.
That is because the sky is falling. Ibm has dropped below 85 billion revenue and diving faster. Have you looked at any of their recent SEC filings? This is a company in serious trouble. Mainframe and associated software and services is declining fast. Customers can get many times faster performance with Intel multi processor systems. ibm is turning into little blue.
The guy had to use Google to find it though.. That’s not a little weird to you? I guess if he wants to find something else whilst browsing IBM’s website he can just fire up another tab and Google that, too? That’s more than a little weak.
Come on!
Are you saying that IBM doesn’t need to put a product link in its product page because it’s easier to use Google?
So why some stuff has plenty of links and menus, while servers don’t?
If Google stops indexing IBM web sites, customers won’t be able to find anything there related to servers, while still being able to find data for analytical services!
The answer can only be one: IBM won’t sell servers any more in the very near future.
https://www.ibm.com/products/us/en/ seems to work.
So I followed Zaphod’s link to look at IBM Series z mainframes. Right there on the marketing page it says that Walmart uses them to help over 250 people a week. Wow – 250 people? This must be one of those “super computers” we hear about.
@Dave the Platypus – good catch, if you watch the video it says “250 million people a week”… this is what happens when IBM fires “expensive” old timers like me (I’m in my 40’s) that have attention to detail, and replace us with underpaid muppets that make goldfish look hyper-intelligent…
@Zaphod – back in the day I worked at ISSC in Niwot, CO (an IBM subsidiary). They had an alarming habit of taking all of the employees who had any skill or experience and letting them go. A few weeks later, they would realize the mistake and hire the employees back as consultants making much more money than they previously had. I got the chance to jump on this, and literally tripled my salary with a 2 week paid vacation in between.
We were working on a project for the state of California using VB3 and a mish-mash of IBM and non-IBM products. We were hideously overstaffed. Just before delivery (18 months late) we submitted our app to Microsoft to review both code-wise and architecturally. They told us it was the most complex VB app they had ever seen, to which our management responded with “Thanks!” What they said next was priceless:
“That wasn’t a compliment…”
“ISSC”, what a flashback, I haven’t heard “Integrated System Services Corporation” named in years, let alone anyone who admitted they worked for them.
The joke was that the reason why ISSC was renamed to IGS (IBM Global Services or Inter Gallactic Screwup depending on your view ) was because ISSC truly was a four letter obscenity.
It’s long been said of IGS: “You can always buy better, but you will never pay more.”
IGS’s service delivery motto with apologies to Ford Motor Company: “Quality is Job None”
Outstanding:
It’s long been said of IGS: “You can always buy better, but you will never pay more.”
The new site is so dumb. To get to mainframes, click on Products at the bottom of the homepage, scroll down to IT Infrastructure, and it is there.
How do I get to mainframes from the IT Infrastructure link at the top of the homepage?
Click on “Analytics” at the top of the page. Then mouse over the IBM logo at the top of the new Analytics page and it will display a row of links. The third column in the row is “Products”. Click on “Products” to list the IBM hardware products listed starting with “Power” and then System Z (mainframes).
HTC does do what IBM is accused of here, oftentimes disappearing models even before a service contract has run out. Good luck getting software upgrades when the product itself is gone.
HAHA, clearly this “customer” doesn’t know how to use a web site. The link to “Products” is at the bottom of the page, as well in the menu on the top right. A simple Control + F discovered that. And what’s CAMMS? I highly doubt this was actually an IBM customer. Sounds more like an angry IBM employee.
You think this is a good website. LOL.
CAMSS – Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, Social, Security
Ever since IBM offshored its web pages to the Asian continent, their website has been a humongous pile of cluster. I’ve pointed out broken links I don’t know how many times, and the idiots who just read off their scripts and respond in broken English and are told to ignore the word “supervisor” respond with empty platitudes.
I know many Asian websites which are designed well by literate designers and developers. On the other hand, when I was working with IBM UK, they decided to deliver CAMSS applications with ‘onsite’ developers from the UK, and the applications delivered were so bad, the customer decided to take the website down this year due to horrible end user feedback and crashes. Offshore are easy to blame, but the real problem is the culture of IBM where people are more concerned about ‘billability’ than quality of work delivered, as that is what defines their PBC ratings.
I think its the IBM culture of failure that inspires poor quality of work, not about people being physically located either in the US, UK or Asia.
> I know many Asian websites which are designed well by literate designers and developers.
Yes, but those are precisely the sort of people IBM would never hire. “Are you even vaguely competent? Then we can’t hire you, you’ll make the managers look like the incompetent morons they really are…”
Not sure if you have identified the cause correctly, but you are certainly correct that IBM websites, across the board are not effective.
There’s no way a marketing/web team in a company that size was able to revamp the site w/o people noticing huge portions of product offerings are missing. VPs’ heads would roll for such a big screw up.
Nope – this is deliberate and a not-so-subtle-way of telling people internally your time is up, and customers that theirs is too, unless they want some of that tasty cloud mash. mmmm…
@Scott ..speaking from experience (I worked there for a very looooong time) – this isn’t deliberate – it’s just incompetence – they’ve fired way too many good people who a) had a brain (remember THINK?) and b) actually cared …those days are over and this is the new normal… it’s the customers I feel sorry for.
@Scott, I’ve been there for years, and I don’t think you understand the quality of upper management at IBM. Nobody moves up to real power anymore without being a sycophant and a yes-man or -woman. They have NO idea what’s going on in the trenches, and to the extent that they become aware of things like this, they don’t do anything because they know it’s the result of drastic resource cuts, which are the result of desperation due to the outright failure of the Sam’n’Ginni-2015-double-the-EPS plan. The tires are bald and the engine’s smoking, and we’re heading for that Cloud just over the horizon, pedal to the metal. Everything’s riding on the Cloud.
Haha. “Alright team, we are ideally positioned to win share in the cloud. This is our time.”… to the people who are just trying to keep the wheels on.
This matches the CEO’s latest decree of the new IBM. Everything is now cloud and Watson. IMO she does not have any idea how to run a business and imagines the revenue can be shifted from “old” to “new” areas by sheer force of will. As she keeps making bad decisions, she needs to come up with a new spin every few quarters to cover it. CAMSS is already the old, obsolete spin from 2015 so the web site is having trouble keeping up with all the changes in spin. Simply willing customers to buy “new” things they don’t need did not work, now the leadership are actively strangling old products so that the overall revenue mix will be higher for CAMSS and Watson. IBM will wink out of existence soon if the BOD does not stop this craziness.
even worse… what if you were to make your (Ginni) and rest of the employees bonus dependent on the growth of CAMSS rather than lets say, profit, stock and revenue growth?
even worse, what if you do not really have new products that make up CAMSS? Have you seen any announcement pointing to innovations leading to sets of new products?
CAMSS is IBMs largest marketing scam ever and all they are doing is labeling products in CAMSS “buckets” in order to maximize bonuses
This happens when you need to fundamentally change company direction but are unwilling to change middle management nor invest in the future (and rather dole out dividend)
The result is actually a defensive strategy… IBM is retracting to its core competence (middleware and mainframe) for its core customer base (financials and travel)
In the end, it is a defensive half baked strategy sold like an industry and company strategic transformation and Ginni is quite the sales lady, I would be too if I had the change to walk away with $200MM for 5 years work
IBM is only slowly being punished on wall street, i guess the speed of decline depends on how many people care. IMHO not that many since no investor action brewing.
Taco, you think the rest of the IBM employees still get bonuses? That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in a while, thanks! Ginni killed the bonuses dead a few years ago even for top performers. “Not sustainable”. She already knew back then she would suck going forward, it seems. Now if you’re super lucky and amazing you get a measly $100 “award” or some “points” to buy lame merchandise you could find at Walmart for less.
@Meinkraft; Taco, you think the rest of the IBM employees still get bonuses? That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in a while, thanks!
Actually, they just *redefined* what a bonus is. Your “bonus” is you still have a job at the end of the year.
Pretty sure they will eventually re-brand the bonus as the “bone-us”.
@Watcher, you’re right on the mark with your comments and observations. CAMSS is nothing more than a multitude of SCAMS foisted upon unwary customers and employees ! Oh wait, CAMSS is Dead in 2016, long live AI (Watson) and the IOT ! You can bet that competition from the likes of Microsoft, Google and others are already in the works….I guess someone forgot to tell Ginni that when you’re at the cutting edge, you tend to bleed (dare I say Hemorrhage) ???
Despite these products being available from the web site of more interest is the statement that IBM has “had decided not to sell any more “.
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if this is correct this is a much bigger issue than web navigation!!!
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This is indeed a company that is eating its kids to (try and) survive.
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First of all, thanks for the article with your usual sharpness.
In my opinion IBM is neither sales- nor consultancy a centric.
It’s death-oriented.
Like almost all superior animals, it is looking for a quiet place to breath its last air out. To do so it needs none to bother it.
Next step will be a new website revamp with fewer pages (maybe 2 or 3).
As a 30-year lifer I saw IBM drift from being a pretty good place with interesting stuff happening to where it is now.
I think it all started with “Unundling”.
However, IBM could give Microsoft tips on internal warfare. I’ve sat in on exchanges between 2 labs over whether the OS or the peripheral should handle an error code, while the customers stewed.
Just before I left (was retrenched) country management told us the concepts of respect for the individual and secure employment were no longer part of the deal.
IBM is not a cohesive being. It is a gang of gangs with differing objectives. The intrigue required to get a product out would curl your hair.
The 050 Data Inscriber was killed on its release date due to non-concurrance by another lab.
A gang of gangs is a pretty good analogy. The problem now is that we could practically assign every first level employee their own VP or Director or BUE when they start (i.e. way too many chiefs and not enough indians actually doing work). When you have all those executives looking for something to do, some way to ‘add value’, it tends to become a soap opera with every exec protecting their sphere of influence instead getting things done. The execs preach integration and uniting to get it done. I don’t think the first level employees have any issues working together. The execs don’t like to work together or unite to get it done.
> @PeterM: IBM is not a cohesive being. It is a gang of
> gangs with differing objectives. The intrigue required
> to get a product out would curl your hair.
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The thing is, that’s almost the path IBM needs to take. Abandon the idea they are a cohesive, single company. Spin the company off into 10-15 smaller, independent companies, and let the “parent” company become nothing more than a holding company, which would by necessity take a very hands-off approach to their holdings (dictates from on high will only serve to destroy the independent units/companies).
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Lou Gerstner may have had a grand idea off a single company that could provide a customer’s needs all under one roof, but today’s IBM will never be that. John Akers was right all along; break the company up. Then the holding company could buy and sell individual units, much the way a mutual fund buys and sells stocks, etc.
Not hard to find at all. A new format for the website matches the newer technologies they want to show as well. Took only a few seconds to adjust and find products: Bob, you are whining unnecessarily. I want IBM to change to the future, and holding on to the old web design would be old technology.
And no, I am not “corporate”, I was RA’d – twice – and am now retired a little sooner than planned.
https://www.ibm.com/products/en-us/?lnk=fdi
Ummm…there are still no real products listed there. Were you in marketing?
IBM has always been bad at their own website. I don’t recall a time when I was ever able to find specific products in that virtual maze they erected. Even when we saved links to product pages for software we licensed, within a few months those pages would disappear, and we would need to go hunting for them again.
Just go to the hamburger on the upper right you will find hardware and software there…
If you think the external web site is bad you should try using the (home grown) search engine on the internal web site, it is, or at least was when I was there, totally useless.
Yep IBM is completely sales centric and the latest news for 2016 backs that up. Sell Watson and Cloud and no mention on service especially the GTS business. Speculate as you will, but expect more dismantling in 2016.
At least they have a sense of humour. I tried the Site Map and received a 404 with the IBM logo reversed with “Hmm, something’s not right.”
that is indeed quite funny
ibm.com just has gone the same “mobile first” (i.e. dumbed down) web design as accenture.com and others…
Years back, I was trying to find the part number for a specific Cisco cable with a proprietary connector. In exasperation I called the general Cisco 800 number. The phone was answered on the second ring by an articulate human, who transferred me to another human who after a brief description of the problem transferred me to a third human who knew everything I needed to know and took my order for the part over the telephone. I requested second day, but Cisco mailed it next day priority for no extra charge.
I created an axiom from this experience, “The less time and complexity it takes a Company to sell to a willing customer, the more customer sales it will make.”
Lesson learned: Cisco is a Sales driven company and IBM is NOT.
Looking forward to your IBM 2016 prediction
Will it be anything different than IBM is laying off 100,000 people? He could just recycle that from last year and still probably be equally wrong.
So tell me how many employees ibm has now vs the number last year. US and world wide?
Cringley was pretty close.
ibm is forced to layoff every year because their business plan is financial engineering.
Actually it was pretty damn close to 100,000 (Globally) and more are still filing out the door. They are closing whole departments and getting rid of most of their expensive staff and replacing them with grads and Millennials. Apparently they even call millennials their “secret weapon”. Most come from agency backgrounds with no consulting or IT experience. Just there to put a shiney spin and try to make IBM look hip. The new design centres they rave about is just some crayon coloured paint and some cheap & cheerful ‘PeeWee Playhouse’ style furniture in a small areas of existing offices. PeeWee is there too 😉 The ability to deliver anything is in severe trouble. The next round of layoffs is due to start any day…but don’t expect announcements. It will just be taps on the shoulder with a fast & quiet exit. Now you see them and now you don’t. I know of more than one person who was asked to lie to a client it was their choice. I think the fact they didn’t have a job to go to would have been a clue.
Something is definitely happening. They are reorging everything… is getting almost comic with these annual reorgs. We are now ‘aligned for growth’… Even though Cringley seems to just pull the details out of thin air, his general sense of IBM is on point. I think his 100,000 employee layoff article last year was correct. It wasnt factually correct, but it did get everyone to look at IBM’s layoffs over the years and general poor treatment of employees. The fiction was truer than the facts.
Before you make more comments about how products have disappeared from IBM’s website, how about an update on your latest prediction that your Mineserver kickstarter project would finally be finished last week.That project hasn’t had an official update since Dec 21. It has only had rare updates since it started.
[…] IBM loses its mind I, Cringley (resilc) […]
Maybe it is time for all of us to forget about IBM. They are totally invested in their plan for the future. Clearly their customers, employees, or anything we say here does not matter. IBM could fail in a few years and nothing anyone says or does is going to get them to rethink things. It is time we move on and focus on more productive topics.
Huh. Maybe IBM can be thought of as doing a sort of Magrathea, as in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, wherein it bankrupts itself in ever more byzantine initiatives and dysfunctional reorgs that have little relation to what people want or what works. Go Ginny, go! You’re the whale (or maybe the flower in the flowerpot) and the ground is getting ever closer. Maybe you’ll have an original thought before you hit the planet.
Is it too hard to type “z systems” or “mainframe” in the search box? Doing so yields mainframe page in about 1 second.
And you still can’t find any real product or service that Ibm sells. LOL.
Mainframes belong in a museum with dinosaur bones.
@Mark… sorry, but Western Civilization still runs in large part on z/OS. It’s true that its ancestry can be directly traced back to S/360 which came out in April 1964… likewise Linux has its roots in Unix (1969). I bet there’s stuff lurking in Windows 10 that came from Windows NT or even OS/2. The reality is not much is new under the sun. And no, I’m not an apologist for IBM – in fact they RA’d me some time back – so I don’t owe them any favors…. or maybe I do… 😉
Less and less of the world is run on mainframes. Let’s face it mainframes are disappearing. The chips and everything else associated are too expensive to produce compared to cheap Intel based systems. Even ibms cloud solution Softlayer didn’t have a mainframe based option last I checked. ibm will keep puffing what is left of mainframes, but they will be gone just like the dinos soon enough.
The last I read, IBM’s chip labs (which have often been on the cutting edge of things) are starting to run circles around Intel’s again – as in, Intel has maybe hit a wall here, and it looks like maybe IBM has already scaled that wall. Whether or not such technological advances make it out into the field in a timely manner, especially going towards help IBM’s bottom line (although they might end up helping someone else’s) remains to be seen, though.
Gee! Where have I heard that one before?
scross, I guess you missed the news that Ibm sold its chip business….
HP (at least the Italian web site) is going the same way: no servers any more.
Execs are liquidating stock options rapidly.
*Goes dark on Kickstarter for over a month*
*Claims the right to speculate on what is good business practice*
Hum…
Ibm shill……..face it ibm is toast, another round of layoffs coming your way soon
Let’s talk about IBM. Did you buy at 200 or 130 in the late 1990s ? back to 130 today…
I don’t think IBM’s insanity can be cured. Their cup is full of CAMSS.
I prefer to call it SCAMS.
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https://www.arkhesanat.com/
A helpful link for future queries such as those featured in the article…
https://www.ibm.com/software/reports/compatibility/clarity/index.html
IBM’s executives are going to face a shareholder lawsuit in the near future. The only reason anyone is buying the stock at all is that they think IBM is a leader in cloud. When they realize that IBM has been counting legacy storage hardware and outsourcing contracts as ‘cloud’ revenue, they are not going to be happy.
I worked in IBM Finance for nearly 20 years. I left in 2015. I could not be happier. Sadly, I think there are just too many issues at IBM to fix quickly. It’s really a text book case of what not to do in business. I saw it all. I believe one of the biggest problems is the employee morale. Management has lied to, beat on, overworked and impeded development. I worked for some pretty nasty people who had no business being in business. Unfortunately, this is often the case throughout the company. Until they jettison most of senior management who support this behavior and some on the Board who have no idea what is going on, expect more of the same. It’s only a matter of time until the valuations go lower and IBM is carved up. It took 100 years to build so it will take more than a few years to dismantle.
I left IBM india labs in early 2015. The problem is management being incompetent. In SWG india all the bottom raters were made managers. The worst among them were then promoted to band 9s and 10s. They just kiss the asses of the execs and parrot whatever they say. They cannot question the execs on their strategy etc. Any good exceptions among them are constantly attacked by rest so that they are not successful. The good technical talent is leaving in droves and using that as an excuse the managers are rewarding the trash that is left. It just did not make sense to keep doing a good job there because of so many others who are pulling down the company and care onLy of their personal fiefdoms. There is still exceptionally talented folks there albeit a few and they are toiling hard but they are constantly under attack by the rival managers. So if this is the case in the US as well then there is very little chance of success
Absolutely agree with you, it’s the real situation also in other countires.
So it’s been some time at my new job at one of IBMs competitors and I see that the only difference there is that there are more competent managers and a more competent C suite. And believe me that makes a huge difference. Morale is good and employees are involved. The revenues of the company are growing.My advice to any old time ibmers worth their salt is leave IBM before you face the axe
I did raise the frequent layoffs with my manager and his answer was since u are a top contributor u will be the last to get laid off if at all it happens. I was like wtf?
Their “jobs” website is even more of a disaster. They decided to bring the management of it in-house to their BrassRing subsidiary. While BR might still have a handful of competent people left that IBM hasn’t already driven out of the company, certainly NONE of them were the ones working on the IBMJobs website. Back when it was run by the previous vendor, you could do searches by region, location, you could select multiple categories, etc. NOW you can search by “country” and “category”. That’s it. No granularity, no advanced search to refine your search, nothing. Granted, they probably only have 5 jobs open in the entire USA anyway.
IBM commercials are a joke. Can anyone tell me what they are selling from these commercials? Just ask people – no one can. A Smarter Planet? Is there Blue Letter for that? They are in a major fog, without a rudder – lost at sea.
Reminds me of the AT&T commercials prior to the 80s before the Bell System brake up. They were just buying good will.
Still waiting for the mass redundancies… tick tick tick. I guess bring out this rumor again in 2017
Just heard that IBM is changing the annual performance review process (former PBC). I hope the change is for the better. I always thought the PBC process was a joke. Here’s an example. In a recent PBC, I thought I was on target for a 1 rating (top contributor). The ratings are 3, 2, 2+, 1 In my opinion, I had done some excellent work. Late in the year, my management team was micro managing a problem which I found and was totally dedicated to fixing. When I asked not to be mirco managed, I was told I was going to be mirco managed whether I liked it or not. The next week I had an interim PBC review in of all months, November. Usually the PBC interim reviews occur mid-year. I was told I would be rated a 2. I was always a solid 2+ contributor and this year was in line for a 1. That was 4 years ago and that PBC score totally demoralized me. Months of hard work completely set aside because my management team was pissed off that I did not need their guidance to get the job done. Subsequently, my only goal was to avoid the daily beatings I got when reviewing my corrective actions. I was not focused on the problem and solution any longer. Just one example of how management will use the PBC system to exercise their personal missions which are most times just plain stupid. I have little faith in the “new” performance plan. Many of my peers had similar experiences. I believe one big problem to overcome is the employee morale. I could go on and on about that, example after example.
I am so happy that my division was x-ed out from IBM in 2014. Not an easy time, but the turn to the better came surprisingly fast. Hope it stays that way. Now, comparing IBM’s products and offerings with their competition from a more or less neutral standpoint, I still see no hope for Services and Software. Cloud – no reason why choosing IBM. Storage – still really good, hope they get sold before they are wrecked by top management decisions (not to the competition, though…).
IBM=Idiot Becomes Managers. IBM is devasted by band 9 and 10 old managers without culture and imagination, unable to understand what have to be addressed. No care for customers, no care of employees. Bug fixing reduced, support very poor, only blablabla on cloud anf Watson. And India’s workers really bad.
IBM will die in fiew years.
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