We’re all just lab rats to IBM

When I was growing up in Ohio, ours was the only house in the neighborhood with a laboratory. In it the previous owner, Leonard Skeggs, had invented the automated blood analyzer, pretty much creating the present biomedical industry. Unwilling to let such a facility go to waste, I threw myself into research. It was 1961 and I was eight years old.

I was always drawn to user interface design and quickly settled, as Gene Roddenberry did in Star Trek half a decade later, on the idea of controlling computers with voice. Using all the cool crap my father (a natural scrounger) dragged home from who knows where, I decided to base my voice control work on […]

By |April 24th, 2012|2012|98 Comments
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Ten years have passed and there is still no cure for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

 

Chase Cringely died of SIDS 10 years ago this week.

By |April 22nd, 2012|2012|69 Comments
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How to fix IBM in a week

Last in a too long series of columns on what’s wrong with IBM.

Enough horror stories, already! How do we just fix IBM?

Well it can’t be done from the inside so it has to be done from the outside. And the only outside power scary enough to get through the self-satisfied skulls of IBM top management is IBM customers. A huge threat to revenue is the only way to move IBM in the proper direction. But a big enough such threat will not only get a swift and positive reaction from Big Blue, it will makes things ultimately much better for customers, too.

So here is exactly what to do, down to the letter.  Print this out, if […]

By |April 20th, 2012|2012|183 Comments
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Magical thinking at IBM

Third in a long series of columns about what’s wrong with IBM

The current irrationality at IBM described in my two previous columns and in the comments so far from about 300 readers is not new. Big Blue has been in crazy raptures before. One was the development of the System 360 in the 1960s when T.J. Watson Jr. bet the company and won big, though it took two tries and almost killed the outfit along the way. So there’s a legacy of heroic miracles at IBM, though it has been a long while since one really paid off.

There are those who would strongly disagree with this last statement. They’d say that with its strong financial […]

By |April 19th, 2012|2012|79 Comments
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Something’s rotten in IBM Dubuque

Part two in a long series of posts about what’s wrong with IBM  

IBM’s 2015 plan was hatched to deliver $20 earnings-per-share to the delight of Wall Street. IBMers were offered a carrot, a few shares of stock granted at the end of 2015, as a reward for helping them achieve that target. It appears that IBM’s goal is not to issue any of those grants as they continue to conduct resource actions (IBMspeak for permanent layoffs) and remove talented and valuable US employees in favor of moving work to low cost countries such as Brazil, Argentina, India, China and Russia.

Work that stays onshore is mainly sent to what are called Global Delivery Facilities (GDF’s), […]

By |April 18th, 2012|2012|211 Comments
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