IBM Blockchain Is a Shell of Its Former Self After Revenue Misses, Job Cuts (coindesk.com) 73
Ian Allison, reporting at CoinDesk: IBM has cut its blockchain team down to almost nothing, according to four people familiar with the situation. Job losses at IBM escalated as the company failed to meet its revenue targets for the once-fÃted technology by 90% this year, according to one of the sources. "IBM is doing a major reorganization," said a source at a startup that has been interviewing former IBM blockchain staffers. "There is not really going to be a blockchain team any longer. Most of the blockchain people at IBM have left." IBM's blockchain unit missed its revenue targets by a wide margin for two years in a row, said a second source. Expectations for enterprise blockchain were too high, they said, adding that IBM "didn't really manage to execute, despite doing a lot of announcements." A spokesperson for IBM denied the claims. "Our blockchain business is doing well, thank you," Holli Haswell, a director of public relations at IBM, said via email. "We have realigned some leaders and business units to continue to drive growth -- we do that every year."
So who's going to buy IBM? (Score:2)
Given that they don't seem to be making much of a go of anything, they sound ripe for acquisition. Amazon? Apple? Google?
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Unless you pick a narrow niche, you do have to be a giant to compete amongst giants these days. Mid-sized generalist IT co's are not doing well in general.
Amazon would be the best buyer fit, but they probably don't want IBM, which caters to institutional organizations and gov't, while Amazon's business customers tend to be small or new. Thus, it would be a culture conflict.
Maybe IBM should split into consulting and servers, merge the consulting biz with another consultant, and Amazon takes their server and
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Hate to burst your bubble but Amazon has HUGE contracts with several large Govt agencies.
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IBM is banking on these Government systems, that would be too expensive to upgrade or migrate off of.
The Agencies don't seem to realize, that with some ODBC connections and some clever disposable Python Scripts, much of this legacy data can be quickly transformed and put into a newer system.
Re:So who's going to buy IBM? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the databases are a specific brand and version possibly not well supported by "cloud".
And ODBC seems to be dying. It needs an HTTP-based replacement. It was originally based on 32-bits, and the 64-bit drivers are often lame or missing. They didn't follow Unix Philosophy: use plain text to communicate between diverse systems, not binary.
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But it's generally for cutting edge stuff, not run-of-the-mill accounting and CRUD. (It may be boring, but it's necessary for society.)
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The best thing to do with IBM is for them to keep doing what they've been doing for the past few decades: cash-cow what remains of the company, keep cutting stuff that no longer makes money, and shrink the company down towards eventual nothingness. The name no longer means anything but legacy technology. IBM pretending to innovate is just stupid. They can't do cloud, they can't do blockchain, they can't do AI. They are not an organization set up for innovation or discovery anymore, despite their rich roots.
Re:So who's going to buy IBM? (Score:4, Interesting)
They can't do cloud, they can't do blockchain, they can't do AI.
I have to wonder if IBM was outsourcing to the lowest bidder (H1B) because their business was crumbling, or if their business was crumbling because they were outsourcing to the lowest bidder (H1B).
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I suspect the latter mostly. The MBA Disease has infected the company for years, and long term goals have been abandoned in the constant quest for short-term stock price gains.
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I have to wonder if IBM was outsourcing to the lowest bidder (H1B)
H1Bs are used for insourcing, not outsourcing.
A 3rd of IBM employees are in India. Nearly all of IBM's H1B applications are for people who already work for IBM.
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IBM management has been trying to maximize dividend payments to activate their own compensation packages at the expense of long term growth.
This has been going on for several years now and the piper is going to come due soon as those short term profit decisions severely impacted long term profitability.
It's possible IMO that IBM could do a GE in the near future and completely collapse.
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What in the world are you talking about? Possibly in your narrow view of what AWS is.
AWS GovCloud [amazon.com]
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IBM Global Services would have been a great acquisition for AWS a decade ago. Now AWS so overshadows them in customers, revenue, services, technology and expertise that it's not worth the trouble to try to migrated the ossified blue shirt culture into their enterprise. AWS is already eating IBM's mainframe business, and I've heard that Big Blue's mainframe support techs are abandoning the company in droves. I think we're just watching the inevitable circling of the drain as The MBA Disease flushes anothe
Re:So who's going to buy IBM? (Score:5, Interesting)
The better question is whether or not this pursuit was just a vehicle for IBM to clear out a bunch of people they didn't want at the company. If they got those individuals to volunteer themselves for the exciting new project it survives almost any kind of constructive discharge laws as well.
It's a stupid idea to try to sell a packaged blockchain solution to a business though. The whole point is to create something that couldn't be "cooked" but the moment any company or entity has total or sole control over it is the point at which that goes out the window. Unless it's something incredibly banal, no company would want to make the kind of information that they might wish to store available to a larger group that would make tampering impossible or at least far more difficult.
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It's a stupid idea to try to sell a packaged blockchain solution to a business though.
IBM used "blockchain" as a marketing term to cover anything that relates to cryptography or inventory tracking, even if there is no actual technical blockchain.
Buzzword Bingo (Score:1)
They did the same with "AI". Stuff may have had optional hooks into neural networks and knowledge bases, but the larger package was ordinary stuff. Marketing to mostly PHB's* can easily backfire, even though it often "works".
The PHB thinks, "I don't know what these newfangled terms really mean, but I'm glad the product has them if and when we need them."
* Dilbert's boss
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Why spend $100 billion or more on a company that doesn't seem to be doing much of anything?
The better question is whether or not this pursuit was just a vehicle for IBM to clear out a bunch of people they didn't want at the company. If they got those individuals to volunteer themselves for the exciting new project it survives almost any kind of constructive discharge laws as well.
It's a stupid idea to try to sell a packaged blockchain solution to a business though. The whole point is to create something that couldn't be "cooked" but the moment any company or entity has total or sole control over it is the point at which that goes out the window. Unless it's something incredibly banal, no company would want to make the kind of information that they might wish to store available to a larger group that would make tampering impossible or at least far more difficult.
I think it made sense for IBM to invest in blockchain, it's a new technology for making a distributed database among untrusted parties, as with any new technology it's really hard to predict what applications there will be.
A few years later... well it turns out that cryptocurrency is the only significant application. Which makes sense, because if there was a big need for blockchain before someone would have invented it.
Still, if you make a policy of not investing in new technologies you don't understand you [lettersofnote.com]
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Cryptocurrencies are not the significant application. As a matter of fact 99.99% of these cryptocurrencies are not decentralized, and are only reinventing the concept of database.
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IBM is no longer a product company. It is mostly a thinktank and R&D company. It has patents and develop patents that could be valuable.
Obviously the blockchain group did not do too well. Though IBM still registered over 200 patent on blockchain in 2020. (According to https://news.bitcoin.com/repor... [bitcoin.com] )
Now, is any of them valuable? Only time will tell.
But in the mean time, IBM used its blockchain group to make sure it does not miss an opportunity, developed patents that could be useful/sellable in the l
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But they are doing something.
Achievements like destroying the community around Redhat. It took less than a year, and look how they turned that community around!
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Redhat is the crown jewel of IBM and the only thing which may keep the IBM name alive.
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Redhat is the crown jewel of IBM and the only thing which may keep the IBM name alive.
Well... I heard they're adding blockchain to systemd -- mainly because it doesn't have it -- so ...
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Oh, I see what you did there :-)
Solution in search of a problem?? (Score:3)
I get that blockchain is good for crypto currencies, however everyone suddenly wanted to apply blockchain to every problem to solve and it. If you only have a hammer every problem looks like a nail ( or an Ice Giant). Blockchain works for Crypto, that's about it. Kind of like 20 years ago and when every problem was going to be solved by wrapping it in a SOAP webservice, unfortunately that caused more problems than it solved. Then SOAP webservices went away ( like block chain??).
Re:Solution in search of a problem?? (Score:4, Funny)
I get that blockchain is good for crypto currencies, however everyone suddenly wanted to apply blockchain to every problem to solve and it. If you only have a hammer every problem looks like a nail ...
Obviously, we need *more* blockchain to solve the problems not being solved by using blockchain ...
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Lenovo?
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Well if you cut jobs, after you miss your revenue target, you are basically shooting yourself in the food.
IBM has a problem that they seem to can't get with the times. Mainframes, Clumsy Software, Expensive and bogged down consulting services.
A lot of IBM bread an butter customers like governments and large organizations are finding IBM not being modern enough to keep their contracts.
You can advertise specs and Price for performance, they could even be true, however IBM is often too big to fit into most
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Softbank?
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And nothing of value was lost (Score:2)
Another groupthink narrative based initiative implodes. Has everything always been governed like this or is it a recent phenomena? Is it even possible to to answer that question?
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The problem with the hype cycle is it assumes that a technology at some point has a utility, so it doesn't track the technologies that fall off and go flat. Blockchain is one of these in my opinion. I can't speak for many of the other uses, but I've worked in manufacturing a good portion of my career and the supply chain benefits that were being touted for blockchain, which was a key area where b
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The big problem with blockchain is that while it promised indelibility (if it was big enough, distributed enough and adding records was expensive enough), but for some reason people kept conflating that with some sort of fact checking. For some reason they thought that if I committed a record of receiving 5 unicorns to the block chain, it was incontrovertible that I had 5 unicorns.
Or, alternatively, if I recorded receipt of 5 genuine turnip twaddlers and sale of 5 genuine turnip twaddlers, there was absolut
I really ... (Score:5, Funny)
hate it when the tulip bulb frenzies don't pan out. Oh well, maybe Gamestop will work out.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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Blockchain Quantum Cloud Watson
Re: Solution? (Score:1)
They obviously didn't apply enough AI to the problem.
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Clearly 3D printing the blockchain solves the proof of work dilemma.
What about all the clients using it? (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought someone was using it to track shipping... or something? Who will support their game changing innovation now?
Or did IBM never actually sell anything, ever? Like, is there zero active deployments of this? That's amazing.
Like, over the last month we've heard of many crazy people who built critical systems in Flash. But there's not one group dumb enough to have bit hard on blockchain? That's surprising, and also a bit heart warming.
Re: What about all the clients using it? (Score:3)
"I thought someone was using it to track shipping... or something"
Nah all the carriers want to lie to you so blockchain is worthless to them. They retroactively change delivery estimates.
IBM - going down same path as HPES (Score:2)
Both companies are shells of their former selves; both have CEO that can't see past the next quarterly statement, and both proclaim to be "though leaders" when in fact they are the rust-belt version of IT.
Meg Whitman and Ginni Rometty need to be instilled into the IT Hall of Fame in the category of "Women Who Failed at IT Leadership".
I'm an former HPES engineer who got out in 2014 when the handwriting was on the wall that engineering took 2nd or 3rd place to "are we going to make our numbers this quarter
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Dont forget Carly Fiorina. Those three belong on the Mount Rushmore of IT shame.
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"They fulfilled the quota"
Her real name is? (Score:1)
It is really bad they bought Red Hat ... (Score:1)
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As Red Hat may sink with them...
Red Hat was already sinking. That's why they sold. Red Hat was systematically doing everything they could to turn themselves around from a company that produced products people wanted to a company that tried pushing people away with a sonic canon. My coworkers and I saw the writing on the wall with RHEL 5, and started to replace Red Hat with Debian, which is far superior to Red Hat in every way.
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What are you smoking? Redhat was and is very profitable with stellar growth.
So you could replace Redhat with a hobbyist distro? That's nice, you're small potatoes and IBM doesn't give a crap about you.
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That type of thinking is what could kill IBM.
The toy and hobby systems, are often just a corner away from being a full enterprise ready system, and often will take popularity, because their niche is often solving a problem that the big guys never touched.
IBM Sells fright trains to companies, where most of them may need a Semi Truck, or just a Van. Red Hat and IBM may be best bang for the buck but that would only be if you are a giant company. Where today even large companies don't need the expense, and a
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IBM's target market can't use the ubuntu / debian for moving money or massive business SQL, that's reality. Their business model does the big end extremely well and that's why your money, your insurance, your healthcare is on their iron on backend even if linux x86 or windows servers in front of that.
I happen to admin vmware on x86 servers and also IBM power... no comparison for power, x86 cluster great for a bunch of servers that mostly don't do much but sometimes a few need to red line, ha!. Used to wor
Re: It is really bad they bought Red Hat ... (Score:1)
"IBM Sells fright trains to companies"
Gee thanks, now I can't unthink this.
Why do companies lie about obvious things? (Score:2)
Why do companies lie about 5G? (Score:2)
Next hype is 5G. You heard it here first.
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No, 5G is necessary to manage traffic for the 20 billion IoT devices already installed and the next 20 billion that are coming. There's little advantage to phone users, but that was never actually the point.
A solution in search of a problem (Score:1)
Poor IBM. They can only dream of the incredible staying power of the Slashdot CMS's cutting edge text encoding logic. I notice that the accented "e" of "feted" shows up garbled on
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well it's an answer to the distributed database problem.. a horrible solution to that long solved problem, haha.
Data integrity? long solved.
Able to permanently delete information as required by law for business use? yup, long solved but wait blockchain can't do that, hahaha!
"blockchain" in business context is only a buzzword to sucker investors.
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I think that IBM themselves have a perfect application to showcase their blockchain technology.
Since they're doing mass layoffs, they can manage the multitude of pink slips by putting them all on a blockchain.
IBM is the Snake Plisskin of the computer age (Score:2)
"I thought you were already dead?"
I'll run this old chestnut one more time... (Score:5, Funny)
Dissociated Press (DP) — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Physicists identify new fundamental particle
May herald a new particle family and restructuring of the Standard Model
Geneva, Switzerland — August 2018
Keywords: hypino, shinyon, blockchain
High energy particle physicists at the CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nullité) facility have confirmed the existence of the long-conjectured hypino (hy-PEE-no). It is thought to be the first member of a new class of particles known as shinyons (SHY-nee-ons), distinct from bosons and fermions.
Unlike other subatomic particles, hypinos carry no charge, and have neither rest nor relativistic mass. Their only defining quantum property is spin. Hypinos are thought to be the fundamental unit of marketing hyperbole. To date, hypinos are the only known members of the proposed class of shinyons, which are of especial interest to tech investors and holders of the MBA degree. Dr. Martin Waugh, of the Institute for Advanced Squander, further posits that the hypino may be the carrier of the so-called “weak-minded force”, a mutual repulsion between fools and their money. It is theorized that, upon sufficiently accelerated spin, hypinos transform into super-excited hyperinos, detectable only by Chief Information Officers.
The discovery of the hypino is recounted by Drs. Robert Crawford and Robert Jensen as follows:
“It was a Friday afternoon, and we and our colleagues were returning from a long lunch. Maintenance on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was scheduled to start Saturday morning, and the apparatus would be unavailable for two months. We were in a ‘what the hell’ kind of mood, so we thought we'd take a fantasy shot, just for grins and giggles.
“We had a few leftover Higgs Bosons from 2012 on the shelf, so our lowly lab technician, Garth Dennis, breech-loaded them into the beast , set up a blockchain for the target, positioned the extremely sensitive Swindleometer at the intended point of collision, energized the superconducting electromagnets, and let it rip. Upon collision, the blockchain shattered into a shower of the elusive hypinos. Examination of the debris field revealed that the blockchain and all of our cash were gone! Apparently the hypinos were entangled with our funding.”
There may be natural sources of hypinos. The strongest natural emitters appear to be located in Redmond, Washington, and Armonk, New York.
IBM Blockchain chained to a block and forgotten (Score:2)
How cute.
Corporate-double-speak (Score:1)
=
"Every year we fail to meet our budgets because they are stupidly large so we have to fire people to make it look like we are making money - additionally we move the dead weight around setting up people and business units to fail because we are and monolithic dinosaur of a company who has not innovated for shit in 20 years."
Did I translate that right?
What problems has the blockchain solved so far? (Score:3)