Comment by quantified
Comment by quantified 6 days ago
Lou Gerstner at IBM is probably the outlier that supported this line of thinking. He was at Amex, RJR Nabisco before IBM.
Comment by quantified 6 days ago
Lou Gerstner at IBM is probably the outlier that supported this line of thinking. He was at Amex, RJR Nabisco before IBM.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but IIRC Gerstner's time at IBM was 100% financialization. He didn't solve any of IBM's core problems. Outside of the momentary bright spot of "Global Services" the largest impact he had was selling off IBM's immense real-estate (and other) capital they had acquired by being a capex business for a 100 years, and converted that all to a decade long free rent/etc 0 opex business, Along with EOL'ing their pension program, and a lot of other 'quality of life' stuff that made them one of the best companies to work for. It made the numbers look great as he "reduced overhead" in the short term, bur just created further long term problems. If IBM could have caught just a single one of the tech waves of the next 25 years they would have done fine, but for some reason they continue to snatch defeat despite seemingly always being in the right place at the right time. But it seems they always overcharge, over engineer, whatever their solutions and the market rejects them. (ex, flash arrays, POWER as an alternate hyperscaler server arch, watson/ML, failing to capitalize on centos, etc, etc, etc) while dumping spinning disk, fabs, etc at roughly the right time.