Virginia Rometty Selected As Next CEO of IBM 131
itwbennett writes "IBM will start the new year with a new CEO. Virginia (Ginni) Rometty, who built up IBM Global Services, will be the company's first female CEO."
Were there fewer fools, knaves would starve. - Anonymous
Re:Get your breasts out (Score:4, Funny)
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Nine weeks. OS/2 has to start first.
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Female? (Score:4, Funny)
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Common misconception. Back in the 50s, when those songs were written, everyone was gay. The world has changed a lot since then.
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Who says that she wasn't... *cough*... just a little bit more successful than the rest of the gay men? ^^
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have you seen her?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2011/10/25/virginia-rometty-named-next-ibm-chief/ [forbes.com]
if that doesn't get the fapping noises going in your basement lair, you're no kind of nerd
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That was a particularly flattering picture. This one, not so much. [itworld.com] Photoshop? Who knows?
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That's not photoshop. It's simply keeping a 20-year-old picture on file.
For what it's worth, she's still not unattractive in the newer photo.
Ugh, here we go... (Score:2)
I don't consider myself a feminist by any means, but I imagine it's a bit frustrating that a discussion of a male CEO rarely ever involves talking about their looks, yet it's one of the primary topics when discussing female CEO's.
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99% of all male CEOs are fat old guys with multiple chins. Is there a need to evaluate them?
When we have had enough female CEOs, pehaps people will stop commenting on how old and unattractive they are too.
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The other 1% is Steve Ballmer, who is fat, old, has multiple chins and is a slaphead.
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If I had to guess her job from that pic, I'd say she's a senior flight attendant, two or three years off retirement. Perhaps it's that dumb hairband. And the jacket.
But to get back to sanity: can she possibly be anywhere as bad as Carly Fiorina was at HP, or Meg Whitman is likely to be?
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As Oscar Wilde said - by the age of 50 everyone has the face they deserve.
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Any nerd can fap to scat pr0n.
This woman has the power to order the upgrade of Watson [ibm.com] to achieve sapience.
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Looks like Val Kilmer in drag.
But seriously.... I'm sure she's a very nice lady.
Sounds OK to me... (Score:1)
Never heard of her until 10 minutes ago, but sounds like she should be able to keep IBM afloat - unlike HP
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If only they wouldn't outsource their call centers. I had a conversation last week with someone who learned their English from Agador Spartacus.
Totally expected... (Score:2)
You only needed to know that she led the Sales division. IBM always gave a lot of credit and power to its sales force, and its CEOs are usually those who held her position.
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And IBM begins collapsing in 3 2 1...
I don't know if IBM will collapse... but their stock sure did in the last 1/2 hour of trading. Wonder if that has anything to do with this news item?
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Not really. A drop of $1 over a shareprice of $180 isn't a steep drop. In fact, most the market did somewhat fall that day. Looking at the monthly trend however, IBM and Apple are the only ones that have had a significant dip over the last month (google finance on IBM [google.com]).
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IBM Closing price on Sept 23: $169.16
IBM Closing price on Oct 25: $180.36
I am not sure where the 'significant dip' comes from.
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The GP is saying that their shareprice has sunk heavily due to the appointment of the new CEO who is female. I am saying that their shareprice hasn't dumped since the appointment. I did say that Apple and IBM were the two companies in the bunch that had a bit of a bad spell over the last month.
IBM shareprice Oct 14th was $189. Now it is $180.
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That is the last 10 days, not month. If you look at the whole month, the price went up.
Re:End of a Era (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really.
It has been very volatile lately, going up and down several dollars for no real reason.
I am on calls 2 or 3 times a month where she is also on the call. She seems well liked by the technical side of the house and is very approachable.
Won't catch me calling her Ginnie, I stick to ma'am and Sir for VP's and above if we are on the clock.
Better her than some other female execs we have.
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Does anyone care to compare her with Carly Fiorina?
That's the real disa^H^H^H^H check we need.
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Sadly, rometty is not much different since she was at the core of the sell offs. The end of IBM was started 10 years ago.
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I worked for IBM watson (via Colorado) back in 1996 ( or was it 94?) when akers was fired and Gerstner was brought in. At the time, we were about to open source OS2. Gerstner killed that idea quickly, which bummed me out. However, while it damaged OS2, IBM was brought back to being a decent a company. I was gone by the time that Palmisano took over and glad that I was. That guy has gutted the company.
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That already happened, long ago.
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1 - Take care of your customers.
2 - Take care of your employees.
3 - The profits will take care of themselves.
T.J. Watson, Jr.
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If you don't know what they are you don't really exist in a major IT organization.
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If you don't know what they are you don't really exist in a major IT organization.
The point is AIX and DB2 are irrelevant. Anyone still using them is doing so because that's what they've used in the past, they're afraid of change, and they're willing to throw away money on a product that's barely better than the alternatives (and only in ways they'll never take advantage of). OR, they're one of the handful of organizations that actually do need big iron design, and since such organizations are so massive and disparate, the vast majority of people in the organization, even the tech guys
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Desktop support and web development aside, big companies use them for a reason. Power is still a viable architecture and AIX is a good OS. Not everyone can run their business on MySQL.
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Or he works for an organization less than 30 years old.
I can't speak for DB2, but AIX is a crock of shit. The only reason anyone chose it back in the day was because Linux didn't exist.
Schizophrenic America (Score:3, Insightful)
It reminds me of that small number of feminists who seem to view sexual liberation not in terms of respect, mature dialogue, and winning their freedom from chauvanism, but merely as the freedom for women to be as sex-crazed and/or misandropic as some men are chauvanist and misogynistic.
Perhaps we shouldn't be so proud of women breaking into a job dominated by assholes? Are we assuming that women, unlike the men with whom they successfully competed to get these jobs, will suddenly be nice people when they're the ones on top? I try to understand when people say the pendulum is still swinging, that women need to make further explicit gains before we can just call it all equal, but I still wish we could reserve admiration and outright celebration for simply people who do good things, rather than continuing to break it out into Men and Women.
At some point the lauding of the "first female" this and the constant keeping of score has to stop if you want to say you achieved real equality.
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Your presumption is that it's about equality. It's not.
It's about women's rights and empowerment.
You get rewarded for having a vagina today, and punished for having a penis.
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You get rewarded for having a vagina today, and punished for having a penis.
And then you whine about it. Endlessly. How manly of you.
Not at all... (Score:2)
She was rewarded because she was the director of the Sales division. It's really common for IBM to grant the CEO badge to whoever led Sales. If an extraterrestrial entity had been in her position, it would have been elected instead.
Re:Schizophrenic America (Score:4, Insightful)
I think we're supposed to assume that since she's female, she's less likely to be a greedy parasite.
Unfortunately, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina have forever destroyed that stereotype.
It remains to be seen if Ms. Rometty is human as well as success-oriented.
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Freedom includes the freedom to be an asshole. One of the standard stereotypes about women is that they're less capable than men in jobs which require making ruthless decisions. Now, personally, I think we'd all be better off if CEOs of both sexes were a lot less ruthless generally -- that is, if they felt some empathy toward and personal responsibility for the welfare of their employees -- but since that's not the world we live in, women have to show that they can perform in these jobs as well as the ste
it is genetic (Score:2)
female primates are way worse than the males; it has to be genetic and it also went on to the humans! females hold on to stuff for a long time and will do nasty things during or finally at the end of that time; won't even be a logical connection, just wham! out from nowhere comes some vindictive thing from the past. at least males deal with it upfront and get over it... that male aggression has a few good sides (just a FEW.)
obviously, there are exceptions, we are not totally run by our genes.
how about hu
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It reminds me of that small number of feminists who seem to view sexual liberation not in terms of respect, mature dialogue, and winning their freedom from chauvanism, but merely as the freedom for women to be as sex-crazed and/or misandropic as some men are chauvanist and misogynistic.
Considering what women have had to deal with throughout history, and still continue to deal with today - this is a hell of a good start, if nothing else.
The respect and dialogue can come later. In my experience it won't come
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It's not some straw man; it's an analogy suggesting that maybe we should prefer men learn from the stereotypical woman in business rather than the other way around.
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Set the strategic direction for the company, make decisions that those below her are too afraid to, meet with the heads of business partner companies .... what do you think a CEO does in general?
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I don't have a clue about the daily activities of a CEO.
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No, at any company large enough to really warrant having a CEO, being technically capable of the work the business is in is almost certainly irrelevant. CEO is a strategic/interface role.
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Are you suggesting that what made Jobs succeed as Apple's CEO was being a good homebrew computer engineer? What made him work out was being a perfectionist asshole who drove others to succeed.
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>no technical knowledge.
She started as an engineer and rose through the ranks. Promoted from within. A rarity.
Straight off you assume she's another Carly or Meg. I think you should take your stereotypes and shove them squarely up your arse.
--
BMO
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Promoting from Within (Score:1)
Why didn't the IBM board offer gagillions to some flash CEO from somewhere else?
Good luck Ginni.
And, in related news... (Score:1)
The world ends tomorrow. Details at 11.
I hope she breaks the trend... (Score:2)
...of former female CEOs, who have all been mediocre (think Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman). I wish her all the best.
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If she was all that mediocre, she'd already have been CEO at HP.
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Or running for Governor or the Senate or some other public office.
IBM Services Company (Score:2)
If you ask me, it's just a matter of time before the slow death of the server group accelerates into high-speed PC/consumer business style death.
Hold that stock.
Re:IBM Services Company (Score:4, Interesting)
That was just one of the GSD failures. There was the Texas Data Center fiasco, which is now being re-bid.
http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/2240031466/Texas-rebids-IBM-data-center-consolidation-project [techtarget.com]
I'm sorry but IBM GSD is full of incompetent buffoons and making Ms. Rometty CEO will drive IBM into the ground. I would sell your stock immediately.
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She headed IBM Global Business Services (GBS, sometimes referred to as IBM Global Services or plain services). It has little to do with GSD or the data center fiasco. I wouldnt start selling or shorting stock yet
More on topic, this was more or less expected. The GBS division has become the cash cow, and has grown tremendously in the last 5-7 years.
Congratulations (Score:4)
Congratulations to Virginia Rometty on her promotion. The glass ceiling isn't shattered yet, but it's cracking.
Is she going to be getting a 25:1 Canadian or Euro style pay package, or is she taking the hundreds to one ratio of many US executives that people are complaining about? The article doesn't say.
IBM is a great place to work or contract. I really enjoyed the time I spent working on a project with them.
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I'll stop when the companies who try to acquire patents on technology they did not invent stop abusing the patent system, and fanboys stop trying to rewrite history. You don't have to read what I post.
Like I care about the objections of an Anonymous Coward at all.
Next stop: head up the USPTO. (Score:3)
And if David Kappos' recent move is any indication, her next big step is clear: head up the US Patent and Trademark Office when Kappos leaves. I'm guessing that IBM would love this move because there she can better serve IBM's interests against those of the public. Kappos, current USPTO Director, was former IBM vice president and assistant general counsel of "intellectual property [gnu.org]" law. IBM holds the most patents. First-to-file undoubtedly helps large firms like IBM because large firms hire lots of lawyers to file all sorts of patent applications. The more patents IBM holds, the more IBM can cross-license their way out of any threatened patent litigation [progfree.org] by threatening countersuit and then negotiating a patent license.
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I had high hopes that she would ... (Score:3)
When I Went Through the Orientation (Score:2)
Since that time I've seen them outsourcing their employees jobs, and I don't know who are their customers anymore. I've seen them lose some remarkable talent to "early retirement" programs. I've seen them sell division after division that were core components of their culture and their business. At one time I felt like even when I wasn't working for them, I knew who IBM was and what they were trying to a
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At one time I felt like even when I wasn't working for them, I knew who IBM was and what they were trying to achieve. Now... I don't. I think they're some sort of storage company.
They still sell more big iron than everyone else put together, and there's still a lot of money in that market. How long this will last, it's hard to say; but people have been predicting the death of the mainframe for decades, and it just keeps on not happening.
Mainframes (Score:2)
The organizations that still use mainframes are up-time fanatics with business models that suffer when a system is unavailable for a few minutes. As a result, they're so conservative that if they were running the country we'd still be under British rule. As long as mainframes work, they'll keep using them rather than risk changing to a different system.
Note: I'm an IBM employee, but this is my personal opinion, not IBM's. Technically speaking, corporations don't have opinions, except maybe "more money good,
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It's not just mainframes... the biggest IBM product we use at wr0k is Netezza (technically not IBM invented, but heck, that's the future of "big databases" right there). Though they should cut their prices in half, or else Greenplum (EMC) will eat their lunch...
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Except that increasingly, mainframes aren't the only way to get high reliability, or even the most cost-effective way.
(Disclaimer: I worked for IBM from 1997 to 2011, and now work for Google, which is perhaps the posterchild for high availability on commodity hardware.)
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You're correct from the technical perspective. But my point is that a CTO of a fortune 500 company would rather spend more money than make changes that could impact uptime. "If it ain't broke, and breaking it would cost you your job, don't fix it"
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Your numbers are wrong and misleading.
First, z900 was not an entry level box, z990 was. However, that may not have been available until 2002. More importantly, you can not use GHz as any measure of mainframe speed, because not all models run at full speed.
So, using the correct numbers and comparison between the same type of box, with a single processor running at full speed, we see the following:
2001 - z900, model 101, 239 MIPS, $500,000 (don't know where you got the $1.2M from)
2011 - z196, model 701, 1
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Yeah... Ginni was my division boss when I worked at IBM a few years ago. I think I even met her once... she give our department a "major" award with a very "minor" cash bonus attached to it. Under her tenure, half of my department's workload was outsourced to India, China, and Brazil.
So, yeah... don't expect anything other than more of the same from her leadership.
She was the second choice (Score:2)
Former IBMer Bob Moffat, who was head of the Systems & Technology Group, was being groomed for the top job. But he got himself involved in an insider trading ring. Not for personal profit, but some careless chit-chat at a dinner party about Sun's finances, which IBM was considering to buy at the time.
So he got canned, and rightly so. If you are smart enough for the top job, you'd better be smart enough to watch what you say. Ginni will be subject to all sorts of scrutiny by the press in he coming m
I wonder (Score:1)
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