Biggest corporate lay-off in history is expected within days, with IBM believed to be scrapping 110K

Daily Mail ^ | 1/26/15 | Thomas Burrows

[Neidermeyer]

Made by Borland.
***********
QuattroPro ...

[PieterCasparzen]

They do a TON of consulting services in the US.

Those are high paying jobs that by definition are not outsourced out of the country, because the client wants them here. Of course, IBM does consulting services all over the world.

Those in services that are on the beach will be part of the starting list.

Sometimes they can do some fancy footwork and stay on, but most will probably go.

[mylife]

Thanks.

[cynwoody]

EXCEL is great but the real genius was VisiCalc ,, the basis for Excel and ALL the other spreadsheets.... IBM failed to patent/copyright it

IBM had nothing to do with VisiCalc. From the Wikipedia:

VisiCalc traces its history to a presentation that Dan Bricklin was watching while attending Harvard Business School. The professor was creating a financial model on a blackboard that was ruled with lines to create a table, and formulas and data were being written into the cells. When the professor found an error or wanted to change a parameter, he had to erase and rewrite a number of sequential entries in the table. Bricklin realized that he could replicate the process on a computer using an "electronic spreadsheet" to view results of underlying formulae.

Bricklin was joined by Bob Frankston, and the pair worked on VisiCalc for two months during the winter of 1978–79, forming Software Arts. Bricklin wrote, "[W]ith the years of experience we had at the time we created VisiCalc, we were familiar with many row/column financial programs. In fact, Bob had worked since the 1960s at Interactive Data Corporation, a major timesharing utility that was used for some of them and I was exposed to some at Harvard Business School in one of the classes." Bricklin is referring to the variety of report generators that were in use at that time, including Business Planning Language (BPL) from International Timesharing Corporation (ITS) and Foresight, from Foresight Systems. However, these earlier timesharing programs were not completely interactive, nor did they run on personal computers.

Frankston described VisiCalc as a "magic sheet of paper that can perform calculations and recalculations", which "allows the user to just solve the problem using familiar tools and concepts". Personal Software began selling it in mid-1979 for under $100, after a demonstration at the fourth West Coast Computer Faire and an official launch on June 4 at the National Computer Conference. It required an Apple II with 32K, and supported saving to cassette or disk.

[proxy_user]

And then what happens when a client needs a dozen guys? They have to go out an hire?

One thing about the Indian contracting companies, they always have people in stock. You need somebody, they can send someone right away.

[silverleaf]

we forget that each of these unemployed statistics has a human face and many have families

many lives are forever changed, some for the better in the long run, but some never recover from losing not only a job but an association with their company identity. When I was doing my MBA (some years ago) IBM was a case study in building a corporate “family” identity and loyalty among its employees

[central_va]

H-1b quotas need to be increased now for sure.

[SunkenCiv]

Data. ;’)

[SunkenCiv]

The Obama Recession

to go with

The Obama Tax Hikes