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 ...
OS/2 was, and still is, a superior Operating System, so far above Windows. But IBM bigshots didn't have the backbones to fight for it.
They thought they could make it with "global consulting," but seriously, who is going to pay $300-500 per hour for IBM "experts?" Only fools, and they don't stay in business for long.
Surrender is NEVER the answer. But that's what IBM did.
IBM execs betrayed their most loyal partners, users and customers, all because the media liked Bill Gates better. The media swallowed all Gates' balderdash. He knew how to manage the media and the media responded.
Come to think of it, Republican Party bigshots are doing the very same thing, aren't they? Surrendering their principles to please the media.
This is not news to my family..........
Not too many of of those thick severance packages in the trenches.
Forget about departments, entire divisions are being done away with. My husband is now servicing clients he had when he was with IBM. One of the reasons he is no longer with IBM is they started ditching those clients leaving the field techs with no work.
I happen to be pleased by what IBM has been doing: creating increasing value for its shareholders. Look at the stock price charts over the past few years and you'll see how IBM has been greatly outperforming the market in general, based primarily on its bottom line strategy. That's what a publicly held private corporation is there to do!
IBM are ditching their US customers left and right. My husband now works for another company and most of his service calls are the same ones he had when he was with IBM. he runs into store managers he used to know back in his IBM days. Also a goodly number of the guys he works with now are also former IBMers.
Was an IBM employee when this was happening. Talk about frustrating even us low peons could see the mistakes that mgt was making. Main frame people who ran IBM in the 90's never understood the PC or PC OS's. There is an arrogance to main frame people that is UFB.
I worked for IBM for 7 1/2 years, from 2001 through mid-2008 when (unlike so many afterward) I voluntarily left to take over a Vice Presidency at another firm in my field (high performance computing, or HPC).
I learned a lot from IBM; it was mostly a tremendous experience. I had some outstanding managers....but at the end of my time there, also had some real duds. I mean seriously clueless putzes.
I was part of a very small team that built a $1.1 billion HPC business almost from scratch in just under four years. You’d think the company and the division I worked for would have been ecstatic, no?
Wrong.
Instead, after lavishing positive attention on us for a few months once they realized what we’d done....they decided to manage the living s**t out of the business. This new crop of idiots waltzed in, an entirely new chain of command with a couple of “extra” management layers, mind you.....and, for example, never gave me 5 minutes of their precious time to ask how to get us to $2 billion...or even HOW we did what we did in the first place. They couldn’t possibly have cared less.
Nada. Zip.
IBM rewarded automotons; clueless bureaucrats who understood process (the author of this piece nailed that part) and could talk the talk. If you stuck your neck out, your head got chopped off.
It stopped being fun....and I couldn’t get out of there fast enough as I watched them starve a huge business that I put blood, sweat, and tears into for years. It was disgusting, sad, and incredibly stupid.
I don’t regret my time there; I’m grateful for the experience. That said, I’d never go back. The company is run by people who are slaves to “the almighty Quarter”; to Wall Street. They could give a damn about the people who MAKE it all happen. Your chart shows impressive shareholder value....but it doesn’t begin to tell the whole story.
When a company becomes a slave to the Street, they forget who they are and what got them to a position of prominence. That is precisely what has been happening to Big Blue.
What makes it doubly sad is that some of the finest people, some of the finest minds I’ve ever known work (or worked) there.
Other way around IMHO. IBM products have become too expensive for the US Market, so customers are resorting to cheaper and, IMHO inferior, products. IBM's unquestioned position as a leader in Quality is no longer sufficient to keep customers.
he runs into store managers he used to know back in his IBM days. Also a goodly number of the guys he works with now are also former IBMers.
Which only proves that the companies with market "growth" also hire to meet demand.
Is IBM making a mistake by reducing US Operations? Possibly. But I have the distinct impression that IBM is simply completing plans it has been pursueing for quite a long time now. IMHO, IBM will become a foreign entity with a US presence in the next 10 years.
Kind of sucks for the 150,000 people they’re getting rid of. And you do have to wonder about how things will be after 2015, laying off to prosperity works as a temporary measure but then you have the whole reduced work production thing. And it sucks for those of us that are going to be stuck competing with those 150,000 for jobs.
Make or perish is the future for American companies. Without creativeness they will eventually slowly twist in the wind.
Judging by IBM's longstanding Smarter Planet campaign, it would seem that that "increasing value" comes from sucking off the public teat.
ML/NJ
The historical fact is that IBM was in trouble with its emphasis on mainframes back in the late 80s and early 90s. It succeeded in reinventing itself, which is very tough to do for such a large corporation.
Ah, OS/2... I knew it well. We used to say that Microsoft was a marketing company that didn’t know how to develop software and IBM was a software development company that didn’t know how to market. Get Warped! Sheees..
yes...they may be backing off...under pressure from the WH...after all this is election year...
You are correct to some degree. In the age of the government leviathian, it's virtually impossible for any large corporation to succeed without cozy relations with Big Brother.
Bump for later
Thanks for the stock tip.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.