SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submission Preview
Cringely, Burger Blast IBM Management On Layoffs, Business Model
Cringely has a pair of blog posts about the latest (annual?) round of IBM layoffs [cringely.com], which probably affected at least 15 percent of US workforce (precise numbers have not been released). Cringely's more recent post, published Monday [cringely.com], starts by dishing on the legal details of IBM's employee severance 'agreement', then pivots to launch haymakers at IBM's business model under CEO Ginny Rometty and her predecessor, Sam Palisano:
The lesson in all this — a lesson certainly lost on Ginni Rometty and on Sam Palmisano before her — is that companies exist for customers, not Wall Street. The customer buys products and services, not Wall Street. Customers produce revenue, profit, dividends, etc., not Wall Street. IBM has alienated its customers and the earnings statements are showing it.
Cringely suggests that Microsoft under new CEO Satya Nadella may have outfoxed IBM by acquiring a leading vendor of the R [microsoft.com] open source statistics language, and by pledging to release SQL Server on Linux. The latter could produce considerable downward pressure on DB2 (and Oracle) licensing prices.
Dan Burger at the mainframe business site itjungle.com usually prefers to stick to business, speeds and feeds and numbers, but he seems ticked off at IBM [itjungle.com] as well:
So instead of the story becoming IBM helps U.S. economy through job creation, it becomes IBM crushes the American Dream and sends more jobs overseas.
Burger notes that the Lee Conrad, former head of Alliance@IBM (a group of ex- and current IBMers who unsuccessfully tried to unionize the company), has started a new website [watchingibm.com] and Facebook page [facebook.com] to replace the old alliance watering hole [endicottalliance.org].
