I'm curious when it was you were there. I was in IBM from 1985-1992, and it felt like the ending of an era. At first, it was a place that invested heavily in its people. Private offices, nice facilities, very good pay, and a _requirement_ that you had to take classes related to your field every year. IBM would hire excellent faculty and instructors from universities and other companies to teach them. They sponsored technical conferences that were really good (actual learning, not just sales). When I was in graduate school, my director had me focus on doing my homework and projects as 80% of my time -- literally getting paid to be a student. My colleagues and I were proud to be "IBMers" at that time.But things started to change in 1990-91. The company lost money for the first time in its history, and then divided into separate parts. My division became what is now the horrible IBM Global Services. In those last 2 years it became clear to me that it was time to branch out of there. Since then, I've know no IBM employee at all who is happy, much less proud.
All these great old institutions ultimately fade or fail. It used to seem more sad to me, but I've grown to favor "fail fast" more. IBM should just go...sell all the IP and branding off and call it a day. Then, new innovation will happen faster.
matheusmoreira|4 years ago
> The company lost money for the first time in its history
Seems to be a recurring theme. In my city there's a large steel industry. The companies used to be quite benevolent, they cared about employees and invested in them, and everyone was proud to work for them. It all ended the second they took losses and it never came back. Now they're just normal corporations, the employee pride is gone.
geenew|4 years ago
Idle speculation, but I wonder if that could save IBM, if and when the market starts to sour on cloud computing (for cost and/or control reasons). Mainframes have a lot of overlap in terms of functionality (VMs, reliability, similar purchasing model for computing power) with cloud services.
burner556|4 years ago