[seankurtz]

On the contrary, the maintenance and continued improvement of an entire ISA and ISA specific operating systems is exactly my idea of hardcore tech, i.e. continuing to pay a chip org to design new chips for said ISA every generation and implement new instructions...and continuing to pay OS and compiler programmers to work those into their OS's and compilers...I'm not sure where we draw the line on maintenance vs. continued development here, but I'm not sure I'd call that purely maintenence.

There really aren't a lot of companies out there that can claim to do similar (and of course besides s390x, an ancient and venerable CISC, IBM also has Power, so they are doing this 2x over). You'll find a lot of IBM employees contributing to what I'd consider "hardcore" tech like LLVM and the Linux kernel as a result, because they genuinely have a large amount of expertise in those and similar areas. And here I'm not even really including Red Hat, but if you include them then they are even more overweight in the hardcore tech category.

If anything, a lot of the rest of the tech industry has left "hardcore tech" behind due to efficiency concerns as a result of a longrunning industry wide process of consolidation and commodification that IBM has resisted for obvious reasons. IBM is hardcore to a fault if anything.

TLDR: I actually think IBM punches above their weight in the "hardcore tech" area so long as our definition is sufficiently low level rather than say, cloud services, in which case fair enough you can probably fairly say they suck at that.

Here I've also chosen to entirely ignore IBM research.