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 ...
I happen to disagree. The customers till have the same products, they are just seeking better and less expensive tech support. It is not the IBM products that have become too expensive, it is their after purchase services.
Their techs were not only required to provide service, but were required to become sales people as well.
A tech with an impeccable customer satisfaction record would be dinged on performance because of a lack of sales. I know this for a fact, because my husband went through it.
I don’t think he ever worked directly for Big Blue. Iirc though he committed “suicide by schnapps” at a very young age.
Notice it’s scheduled to go over the next 3 years, and the public is already aware.
IBM lost it completely when it ceded the consumer market to focus on what? While they still have a huge profit line, they are no longer a company that matters to consumers. Their name is not on everyone’s lips for innovation or design. Most people haven’t heard of them in years.
From the consumer point of view they sound more and more like “the world’s largest typewriter manufacturer.”
"Alliance@IBM/CWA Local 1701is an IBM employee organization that is dedicated to preserving and improving our rights and benefits at IBM. We also strive towards restoring management's respect for the individual and the value we bring to the company as employees. Our mission is to make our voice heard with IBM management, shareholders, government and the media. While our ultimate goal is collective bargaining rights with IBM, we will build our union now and challenge IBM on the many issues facing employees from off-shoring and job security to working conditions and company policy."
I competed with IBM for most of my 40+ year career in sales and in 1999-2000 was with a company that IBM bought.
Since I had many thousands of options in single digits and IBM payed $ 18, I have no bad words for Big Blue.
I left after less than a year because I had always sold for young, start up companies, with little structure and large commission rates, and so we didn't agree on the way I should be compensated.
But for a very large company, in my short employment there, I was impressed with senior management and the professional way almost all IBM employees acted.
Had I known that al queada was going to pull a 9/11 I'd have never left IBM, but with 20-15 hindsight, I'd have changed a few other business decisions that I made.
How's Apple doing?
Even Microsoft keeps its distance so far as I can tell.
IBM sucks up. I hope they die.
ML/NJ
Ruh Ro.
Information Week February 28, 2012:
IBM has laid off more than 800 workers at locations across the U.S. in the past 24 hours, according to company sources and documents obtained by InformationWeek....
IBM's U.S. headcount fell from about 134,000 employees in 2005 to roughly 105,000 in 2009, the last year it broke out its worldwide employee distribution by country. Since then, its U.S. headcount has fallen to 98,000, according to an estimate by IBM employee advocacy group Alliance@IBM, which is affiliated with Communications Workers of America, Local 1701.
IBM has said it needs to build up its workforce in regions where it's seeing growth. The company's sales in the Asia-Pacific market were up in 9% last year, compared to 7% in the Americas. But critics say that, as IBM increases its presence in countries where wages for programmers can be as much as 75% less than in the U.S., the burden of the redistribution is falling too hard on American workers.
“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! “
Granted, this style of management does create wealth for stock holders, but America is being reduced to a relatively small “investor class” and a shrinking skilled worker middle class. And where do these displaced American skilled workers go when their jobs are eliminated or “dumbed down” so a non-English speaker can take it over?
Maybe the stock holders will pay our salaries? No?
I am still a few years away from retirement, I hope I can hold out until then.
IBM Is obviously leaving the country, and that knowledge is reflected n its increased market value since then.
You guys aren't fooling anybody.
Obama would like to think so; it makes his class warfare politics more successful, at least in his way of thinking.
During the Bush years, financial commentators were saying that there had never been a higher percentage of Americans with investments - directly or indirectly - in the financial markets. The current recession has lowered that somewhat, but it's still high by historical standards.
I feel for the people being laid off by IBM. That being said, I have my doubts about Cringely's numbers. As a mitigating factor, at least some of these former IBMers are IBM shareholders too, thanks to IBM's stock purchase plan for its employees.
Tellingly, Cringely said nothing in his piece regarding the contribution of the Obama Administration's anti-growth economic policies to the IBM lay-offs.
IBM has been doing it for years and no one ever finds out on a large scale. There usually are no articles in the paper and the main ones who know are the employee's family/friends.
Those who are cut are paid off to stay silent, and in fact, can lose their severance packages if they make waves.
The remaining employees take on more and more work, in addition to being forced to work with lazy 3rd world workers (such as in Ireland). You get what you pay for, and we are constantly told that they can hire 2-3 in Ireland (or China or almost anywhere else) for one of us. Often, in addition to accent/translation issues, there are quite vast cultural differences, making it difficult to "team."
In addition, the outsourced ones, again, such as in Ireland, have something like unions. Essentially, if they pass their probation, they can never be laid off (I've heard jokes that even if they murder someone). That sure makes them work harder (not).
Meanwhile, too many of the few remaining jobs in the U.S. are filled for quotas only, and not for intelligence/skill.
It's like working on the Titanic at this point.
As I said, “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”.
They’re losing business to companies with higher percentages of offshore workers: IBM’s problem isn’t too much offshoring, it is poor management, including management of their offshoring.
I agree that shareholder return is the point of businesses like IBM and this guy is contorting things to make a political point about them.
But the question is whether some of that profit was short-sighted or is unsustainable as more effective providers are now considered by their customers to be viable alternatives.
Robert X. Cringley had been several guys until one of them decided to quit the gig at the Info Week (?) and take the name with him. There was a lawsuit, who won, I don’t know. Was that Stephens?
There are so many experts who know what’s wrong with the world and parts of it like IBM, that I wonder why they are driving cabs, cutting hair and tending bars instead fixing the things and places they know so much about.
Your link is to an article from May 5, 2010. Is that evidence that Cringley is wrong April of 2012? BTW, Why did IBM stop breaking out employees by country recently???
From Wikipedia, In 2010, IBM employed 105,000 workers in the U.S., a drop of 30,000 since 2003, and 75,000 people in India, up from 9,000 seven years previous.
IBM India listed 131,000 employees for 2010, not sure why the difference from above.
Here are numbers for U.S. workers as compiled by Alliance at IBM, a union (UGGGHHH) seeking to represent Big Blue employees (2011 and 2010 are estimates by Alliance since IBM no longer reports jobs numbers by country):
2011: *98,000
2010:*101,000
2009: 105,000
2008: 115,000
2007: 121,000
2006: 127,000
2005: 133,789
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