Some patterns are very hard to break. From the very early days of the systems business as we know it, which started six decades ago, the fourth quarter of the calendar year has been the money maker for companies like IBM, and the second quarter has been a relatively big one for those who could not get their budgets together before the end of the prior year. …
Speaking in generalities across any aspect of history is always risky, but that is what the job of history is. …
The company was named International Business Machines for a reason, and over the several decades that IBM concentrated on peddling managed services and consulting services to the largest corporations on Earth, with its Global Services behemoth representing two-thirds of its revenues, the company lost touch with, and took for granted, the machine part of its rich and long heritage. …
IBM may not be the biggest provider of systems in terms of the size of its customer base, but of the top 5,000 or so companies worldwide that are not hyperscalers and cloud builders in their own right, Big Blue does have a sizeable share of the system budget. …
The tight linkage between chip designs and chip manufacturing processes has caused its share of havoc in the IT sector, and it is getting worse as Moore’s Law has slowed and Dennard scaling died a decade ago. …
It is frustrating sometimes how IT vendors talk about themselves, particularly when it comes to public companies and those rare few who report financial results even though they are privately held. …
At its heart, and until the day it dies, if a corporation ever really dies, International Business Machines will be a platform company, no matter how much it tries to bamboozle itself or Wall Street or Main Street otherwise. …
There isn’t really a systems business so much as a collection of them, all unique and all facing their own particular challenges. …
The secret to the longevity of any big corporation is a nearly constant process of reinvention. …
When Globalfoundries decided to stop its development and rollout of both immersion lithography and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography at the 7 nanometer process node back in August, it looked as if IBM, second only to AMD as a server chip customer for its most advanced fab in Malta, New York, would be left in a lurch with its future Power processors. …
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