Posted on 04/29/2012 8:00:09 AM PDT by Daffynition
Reducing employees by more than three quarters in three years is a bold and difficult task. What will it leave behind? Who, under this plan, will still be a US IBM employee in 2015? Top management will remain, the sales organization will endure, as will employees working on US government contracts that require workers to be US citizens. Everyone else will be gone. Everyone.
(Excerpt) Read more at betanews.com ...
That sounds strikingly familiar????
Reduce their work force by 3/4? When did they announce this? How has it been kept so quiet?
Who knows why? We’ll see if Cavuto talks about it tomorrow.
**The direct impetus for this column is IBM’s internal plan to grow earnings-per-share (EPS) to $20 by 2015. The primary method for accomplishing this feat, according to the plan, will be by reducing US employee head count by 78 percent in that time frame.**
Thick severance packages and a fat stack of paperwork accompanying. I know two people that were "let go" from IBM in the past couple years. Entire departments are being killed off quietly.
When was the last time IBM was relevant?
They probably have a man in Washington to smooth things over.
IBM, though still showing goof financial results, is out of gas. Like Microsoft and many other behemoth entities, IBM would benefit from breaking itself up into much smaller, leaner, and smarter operating units (Lenovo, anyone?). They still have some very good products and services, but molding the whole thing together into one package with a famous label on it hasn't worked very well - and the days when "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" are pretty much over.
What? Again?!
I thought they went out of business a few decades back.
It would be nice if the author had a clue ....
IBM Hardware Products are still amoung, if not, the best. The US Market has been tanking and there is no need to maintain the workforce where there is no demand. Asia is “growing” and so is the demand - thats why they are investing there.
Manufacturing of almost ALL computer products has been shifted to Asia, regardless of who (including the authors belove Apple!).
Programmers and Co in India aren’t top notch? THE MARKET DOES NOT CARE! They want cheap. It’s been that way for over a decade. And you get what you pay for.
Sales and Technicians? You need those where the customers are - and - THAT IS NOT in the US (or Europe) at the moment.
They’ve always managed to keep things quiet, including pretty massive lay-offs. They’ve laid off basically all of the dead wood in the U.S., outsourced every job they could, and now are laying off the good workers (around 2,000 more just a month+ ago).
“Roadmap 2015” is affectionately known as “Roadkill 2015.”
All employees were given stocks that would vest in 2015, most people figured they would never see that stock.
The U.S. count has gone from about 150,000 in 2000, to 98,000 now. IBM doesn’t release numbers, but there are other websites/places that keep track.
Global Services is IBM’s business now and they are struggling to renew their major contracts because their offshore competitors are now viable on that scale and can usually deliver high customer satisfaction, so IBM can’t renew their contracts at their current pricing structures and they have to find savings in their delivery.
Whether they can successfully reinvent themselves yet again and in that way is still to be seen, but I think the inefficient layers of administrative overhead and effective management of offshore delivery are more of issue than their shifting to a higher ratio of offshore labor.
IBM: Technologies Graveyard.
Then somebody came out with PCs and I never looked back.
Sitting here today in front of an Apple in fact.
Corporate folks went DEC then went Dell ~ for a variety of reasons America's then largest employer just didn't need IBM anymore, and neither did I.
The scent of death was on the land. Kodak went down last year. GM went down 5 years ago. Things change.
This is the first I’ve heard of this “plan”, but I can believe it. The “bean counters” run the company and they are not known for looking into the future very far.
The end result will be another U.S. company destroyed as they get rid of the “Dead Wood” also known as older employees with all of the experience necessary to keep things running smoothly.
“IBM seems to believe it is cheaper to replace a skilled worker with two or three unskilled workers to do the same job. That is like hiring nine women to make a baby in one month. While it looks good on paper it is not practical and is not working. The language barrier for IBM’s Indian staff is huge, for example. Troubleshooting, which was once performed on conference calls, is now done with instant messaging because the teams speak so poorly. Problems that an experienced person could fix in a few minutes are taking an army of folks an hour to fix. This is infuriating and alarming to IBM’s customers.”
ummmm, yes.
How about an experienced guy in the field (like me) who can fix it in minutes?
(No, I have never worked for IBM but that is the new paradigm across all of technology)
May 17th, 1979. Ask Mrs Grover.
Looks like they’re backing off. Trial balloon. Show across someone’s bow?
http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/opensource/224700807
IBM Denies Plan To Cut 75% Of Workforce
Big Blue dismisses report that it intends to replace three-quarters of its global staff with independent contractors.
By Paul McDougall InformationWeek
Dear IBM: Cheap || Fast || Good. Pick two.
It was announced a few weeks ago. It hasn’t been kept quiet, at least not if you’re in the software industry.
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