How to fix IBM

IBMGiven IBM’s earnings miss last week and the impact it had on company shares I thought rather than just criticizing the company it might make better sense to consolidate my ideas for how to fix IBM. Here they are.

Early in his tenure as CEO, Sam Palmisano made changes that created IBM’s problems today. IBM customers are buying fewer products and services. Revenue has dropped each quarter for the past ten. Sam’s changes alienated IBM customers, many of whom are ending what has been in many cases a multi-decade relationship. No amount of earnings promises, no amount of financial engineering, will fix this problem.

IBM forgot the most important part of running a business. While shareholder value […]

By |October 27th, 2014|2014, Business, Companies, strategy|149 Comments
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Ginni comes to her senses, but too late for IBM?

Ginni_RomettyThis week, of all weeks, with IBM seemingly melting-down, you’d think I’d be writing about it and I have been, just not here. You can read two columns on IBM I published over at forbes.com, here and here. They are first day and second day analyses of IBM’s earnings announcement and sale of its chip division to GlobalFoundries. I could publish them here three days from now but by then nobody will care so instead I’ll just give you the links.

One thing I can do here is consider the way IBM CEO Ginni Rometty is spinning this story. She was all over the news […]

By |October 21st, 2014|2014, Business, Companies, strategy|106 Comments
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IBM’s Power8 servers are less than meets the eye

ibm-nvidiaTwo weeks ago IBM told the IT world it was taking on Intel in the battle for server chips with new Power8 processors incorporating advanced interconnection and GPU technology from NVIDIA. This followed an announcement earlier in the year that Google was using Power8 processors in some of its homemade servers. All this bodes well for IBM’s chip unit, right?

Not so fast.

Some product announcements are more real than others. While it’s true that IBM announced the imminent availability of its first servers equipped with optional Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), most of the other products announced are up to two years in the future. The real sizzle here is the NVlink and CAPi stuff that won’t really […]

By |October 12th, 2014|2014, cloud computing, Companies, Internet, Software, Technology|19 Comments
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Apple proves that moats are for dummies

moatAs we all know, Apple last week announced two new iPhones, a payment service (ApplePay), and a line of Apple Watches that require iPhones to work. There’s not much I can say about these products that you can’t read somewhere else. They are bigger and better than what preceded them and — in the case of ApplePay and the AppleWatch — just different. They are all topnotch products that will stand out in the market and have good chances of being successful. So instead of writing about products we already know about, I’d like to write about moats to protect products from competition.

Moats, as you know, are defensive fortifications typically built to surround castles, making them […]

By |September 15th, 2014|2014, Business, Companies, competition, Industry, Product Development, strategy, Technology|65 Comments
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Refresh mobile hits the desktop

Screen Shot 2013-09-27 at 1.16.26 PMI’ve been away on a secret mission, which must remain secret for awhile longer.

Somehow this summer my so-called career had a revival of sorts. My earnest and heartfelt book, The Decline and Fall of IBM, is doing well and will shortly appear in a number of foreign language editions coming from actual book publishers. In a week or two I’ll publish here a general IBM update that’s mainly material to bring those foreign editions up to the present. The short version is it still sucks being Big Blue.

But wait, there’s more! Suddenly I have four (four!) television projects in the works, two of them literally back […]

By |August 29th, 2014|2014, Books, Companies, Industry, Internet, Media, mobile technology, Social Media, Television|34 Comments
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