http://www.itworld.com/article/2875112/ibm-is-about-to-get-hit-with-a-massive-reorg-and-layoffs.html
From the article, "IBM is expected to go through a massive reorg next month that will reportedly see 26% of its 430,000-strong work force let go, or 111,800 people. If that figure holds true, that would make it far and away the largest corporate layoff event in history, breaking the record previously held by IBM, when it cut 60,000 in 1993."
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IBM "Expected to Cut 26% of Workforce with over 111,000 Layoffs"
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Monday January 26 2015, @08:07PM
Companies that don't produce any goods or services usually need to layoff people due to lack of means to continue paying them.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Monday January 26 2015, @08:13PM
I wonder if the CEO who had the bright idea to sell their reliable (if not maximally profitable) hardware division to Chinese investors to boost one quarter's numbers has already ridden their golden parachute out.
Because Lenovo isn't contracting. IBM is.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ikanreed on Monday January 26 2015, @08:18PM
Why do I ask questions when I already know the answer [wikipedia.org]? He left just in time for the start of their massive shrink-off. [cnn.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @11:12PM
In just world this person would be tracked down and "held accountable".
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Tuesday January 27 2015, @09:41AM
Invisible hand!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @08:22PM
With IBM's cost structure (lots of overhead?), I don't think their PC divisions were doing all that well when they were sold to Lenovo. PC hardware is a race to the bottom with a number of big players in trouble. Look at all the problems Dell has been through (for just one example).
IMO, the sale to Lenovo was a shame, the IBM ThinkPads I've had were first class, but I guess not enough people were willing to pay that much of a premium for high quality.
IBM has plenty of other problems...!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by keplr on Monday January 26 2015, @08:27PM
I still weep for the loss of the true Thinkpads we had back before the chiclet keyboards, the one button trackpads, and the overall drop in build quality. There's still nothing quite like it on the market, and probably never will be again.
I don't respond to ACs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @08:37PM
Yeah, you have to wonder. All the technology advancing, but the quality and features have seem to have spiked a long time ago. I would laugh at the comparison between what's possible with todays technology and the products coming out of them production lines, but i have to use them too.
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Monday January 26 2015, @09:01PM
I bought myself a thinkpad t420 and that had the last of the proper keyboards and proper 3 button mice. very usable for linux.
at work, they bought me a crappy w540 with some stupid trackpad that has NO buttons; you have to guess where the 2 button areas are, but it never worked well and the middle mouse button was gone, of course.
I also had blue screens on win7 (corp edition) fairly often.
you have to be careful about which TP you buy. they are going downhill, for sure.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Monday January 26 2015, @09:56PM
I gave my T60 to my brother some time ago and got a G500 because I wanted a little more horsepower. It's functional, and made for a decent hackintosh, but I miss the old thinkpad feel so much.
Gotta say, though: In spite of not being real Thinkpad quality, it still feel nicer than any other equal price budget laptop I've tried out.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Monday January 26 2015, @10:58PM
on my t420, there is a plastic barrier to avoid spills and dust/dirt. I have not seen that before on typical consumer laptops.
thinkpads (some of them) can be found with 3 button mice. reminds me of the old sparcbooks and tadpoles that had 3 button 'unix mice' back when pc's were still all 2 button based.
BUT - beware of the blacklist bios! hp and lenovo both blacklist common pci-e cards (like wifi, sometimes even ssd!) and for me to upgrade to 802.11ac, even using the exact same intel centrino wifi lenovo would have used, it refused to boot; so I had to go rogue and use a downloaded hacked bios that had its blacklist removed. I can't fully trust this bios (who knows what was done to it, really) but I can use any card I want, now. I did not know of this hp/lenovo blacklist before I bought it. I would probably pass on lenovo for this very feature unless you are happy buying THEIR preconfigured hardware and never adding your own pci-e cards, etc, in.
I'll end on a good note (lol): the media bay can take spare batteries, opto drives OR hd drive caddy/trays, so you can have lots of choice on what the media bay is used for. the old NEC versa books were like this and not too many follow this idea. lenovo still has models that use media bay 'modules' and its a really cool feature to have. to save weight, I put an empty hdd tray in my media bay; keeps dirt out, saves my opto burner (no banging around while on the road) and saves weight, too.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Tuesday January 27 2015, @05:16AM
Yeah, the blacklist is some pretty harsh bullshit. I had to find a hacked bios for mine for a new wireless card for OSX, which caused me no small amount of worry. On a hunch, I opened it up with a hex editor and only found a byte or two modified from the same version bios downloaded from Lenovo, which makes me think that it either legitimately just flipped some logic on the blacklist or jumped past the check completely... or they turned on the already built in Lenovo spying mechanisms. The former being fine, and, well, I had to buy the laptop with the premise I was trusting Lenovo to some degree. I doubt much more could have been snuck in with so few changes.
Still gives me the creeps though. Everything works great, but I'm not feeding the damn thing my SSN anytime soon.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 1) by twistedcubic on Tuesday January 27 2015, @02:04AM
The 3 buttons are coming back in the next month. Apparently Lenovo is listening to the constant complaining.
(Score: 2) by Leebert on Monday January 26 2015, @09:37PM
/me raises a glass in remembrance of the once venerable ThinkPad.
(I often wonder what Richard Sapper thinks of what Lenovo has done to them.)
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Tuesday January 27 2015, @09:45AM
I'm on my last t410s, my third, and it won't last much longer., so I've started using a Mac, laptop for normal day to day computing. It's not as good as a linux/thinkpad solution, the thinkpad no longer exists. As usual Apple make the shitlet/trackpad work (just about), while other manufacturers haven't got a clue, but burn their USPs chasing the herd.
(Score: 2) by SuperCharlie on Tuesday January 27 2015, @02:36AM
I recently got back in the work force. This company has tons of brand new Lenovas, and it pains me to think of these best buy bargain quality laptops as the successors to the real think pads I remember.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @08:36PM
Apparently that 100k is a rumor and off by 10x.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-layoffs-coming-nowhere-close-174105554.html [yahoo.com]
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-disputes-report-big-layoffs-173506869.html [yahoo.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by keplr on Monday January 26 2015, @08:38PM
Yeah, a "rumor". How do you make 10,000 layoffs seem like no big deal? Leak a rumor that it was going to be 100,000.
I don't respond to ACs.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @08:45PM
They are laying off 10k. But hiring 15k. (source, from the links you replied to)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 27 2015, @04:26AM
Wanna bet that the folks they're letting go are the ones who actually know their stuff (high wage staff) and the new hires are considerably cheaper e.g. H-1Bs?
If you have heard the word "recovery" on Lamestream Media, that's corporate-friendly BS.
The Bush-Obama Depression continues and we aren't yet at the low point.
What we needed was another FDR (who put 15 million Americans to work when 1 in 4 Americans had been thrown out of work by Capitalism's failiure--once again).
What we got was another Neoliberal Casper Milquetoast.
...and we're approaching the 1933 numbers. [shadowstats.com]
(The Govt's numbers are, of course, complete crap. It's been years since they even got the trend correct.)
Nothing that caused the meltdown has actually been corrected and all of those land mines are still there waiting to be detonated.
The race to the bottom continues.
Working people continue to become more and more stretched economically.
IBM's move is yet more evidence that the USA is an empire in decline.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by jcross on Tuesday January 27 2015, @04:24AM
Right, according to IBM. Apparently they might just be counting straight up layoffs, masking the real bulk of the operation as "performance-related" firings and other nonsense. See Cringely, who originally reported this, for a more in-depth response:
http://www.cringely.com/2015/01/26/ibm-right-gadfly/ [cringely.com]
(Score: 1) by jcm on Tuesday January 27 2015, @10:23PM
Of course, it's not 100K, it's only 99999.
(Score: 2) by fadrian on Monday January 26 2015, @08:43PM
Do they still have that many people here in the US to lay off?
That is all.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday January 26 2015, @09:06PM
They can lay off people in other countries, you know.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday January 26 2015, @09:38PM
So they now even outsource laying off? ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday January 27 2015, @12:38PM
No, they've been slashing their USA workforce for decades, and the news got so bad that by 2010 they stopped reporting USA staffing numbers. Back then it was about 100K so no, they almost certainly do not have 100K americans left to downsize.
GE is kind of like that too. Old people or out of touch people call them "american companies" but all they got left in the USA is some sales offices and a spot on the stock exchange, everything else has moved to China / India.
They used to be major American companies... a long time ago. Now they're major Indian / Chinese companies.
There's still plenty of corporate press releases in corporate news where IBM, to this day, claims there's a huge STEM shortage in the USA and "we" need more STEM grads (to be downsized?), although who this "we" is, is a little unclear since its obviously not IBM.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @09:13PM
nice.
I will be looking for new hires with "worked for/at IBM" on resume.
thank you IBM.
(Score: 3, Funny) by MrGuy on Monday January 26 2015, @09:44PM
http://www.theonion.com/articles/ibm-emancipates-8000-wage-slaves,806/ [theonion.com]
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday January 26 2015, @11:19PM
https://cnsnews.com/news/article/ibm-flatly-denies-report-mass-layoffs [cnsnews.com]
You know the playbook for handling bad media attention:
1. Deny everything
2. Admit to something lesser than you're accused of
3. Admit to everything you're accused of
IBM has done 1 and 2.
They actually probably won't lay off all one bazillion people at once because it would be too expensive. They'll dribble out a few thousand per quarter until they achieve the number. Also, laying off a few people per quarter juices the bottom line for a few years, by which time the current management will have cashed out and moved on.
IBM was once a good company, until it was taken over by the professional management class, the people who I keep saying took over in a generational change. They don't know or care what IBM is, they're just milking it for bonuses until the money dries up. If they destroy IBM, it's what parasites do to their host, so it's a natural process.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 27 2015, @03:46AM
Didn't they just allocated a large sum of money to 'further push' diversity in their ranks?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 27 2015, @07:44AM
H-B1 holders not diverse enough for you?
And why do "activist women" now want others of their gender to pursue a collapsing job market?
If anything I'd steer my daughter away from STEM, well that and an English major.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 27 2015, @08:42AM
They want white men gone.
cunt women in.
Revolution is needed.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday January 27 2015, @07:52AM
My aim for The Global Computer Employer Index [warplife.com] is to link to the "Careers", "Contact" and homepages of every company on the planet that hires anyone to do with computers - not just coders but sales, marketing, project management, QA, tech support and the like.
I've been building it by hand but I have some proposed ways to automate it.
So far I have lists for San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Boston, Vancouver Washington, Portland Oregon, Seattle and London.
I have a lot of companies that I've been organizing in OpenOffice spreadsheets until I get complete records.
A serious problem is that lots of companies will advertise open positions but they either won't mention the positions anywhere on their sites, or if they do the URL for the open position is not at all obvious - like not linked from the homepage.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1) by WillAdams on Tuesday January 27 2015, @02:07PM
There are apparently a number of other stories along the lines of this one:
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2013/07/pa_terminates_contract_with_ib.html [pennlive.com]