Comment by helsinkiandrew

Comment by helsinkiandrew 4 hours ago

15 replies

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> IBM has not exactly had a stellar record at identifying the future.

IBM invented/developed/introduced magnetic stripe cards, UPC Barcodes, the modern ATM, Hard drives, floppies, DRAM, SQL, the 360 Family of Mainframes, the PC, Apollo guidance computers, Deep Blue. IBM created a far share of the future we're living in.

I'm no fan of much of what IBM is doing at the moment but it could be argued that its consultancy/service orientation gives it a good view of how business is and is planning to use AI.

hinkley 3 hours ago

They also either fairly accurately predicted the death of HDDs by selling off their research division before the market collapsed, or they caused the end of the HDD era by selling off their research division. They did a lot of research.

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  • ReptileMan 16 minutes ago

    The hdd being dead will surely come as a surprise to the couple of 12TB rusties spinning joyously in my case right now.

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    • newsclues 4 minutes ago

      HDDs would be much more important today if flash storage didn’t exist.

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Aperocky 4 hours ago

The other way to look at it is that the entire consulting industry is teetering on catastrophe. And IBM, being largely a consulting company now, is not being spared.

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  • kelnos 2 hours ago

    IBM isn't failing, though. They're a profitable company with healthy margins, and enterprises continue to hire them for all sorts of things, in large numbers.

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  • ahartmetz an hour ago

    > The other way to look at it is that the entire consulting industry is teetering on catastrophe

    Oh? Where'd you get that information?

    If you mean because of AI, it doesn't seem to apply much to IBM. They are probably not great at what they do like most such companies, but they are respectable and can take the blame if something goes wrong. AI doesn't have these properties.

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  • carlmr 4 hours ago

    This is a separate argument though. A failing company may still be right in identifying other companies failure modes.

    You can be prescient about failure in one area and still fail yourself. There's no gotcha.

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    • esseph 3 hours ago

      IBM is not a failing company though, they are a Goliath in the Enterprise space.

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      • carlmr an hour ago

        Still besides the point. The company failing or not is orthogonal to them being able to identify failure in others.

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    • marliechiller 3 hours ago

      > A failing company may still be right in identifying other companies failure modes.

      Agreed if this is what they are doing, but what if theyre spewing claims to try and discredit an industry in order to quell their shareholder concerns?

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Glemkloksdjf 40 minutes ago

For the fact that they invented Deep Blue, they are really struggling with AI

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  • catwell 14 minutes ago

    Their Granite family of models is actually pretty good! They just aren't working on the mainstream large LLMs that capture all the attention.

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meekaaku 2 hours ago

IBM is/was good at inventing a lot of tech.

It may not be good at recognizing other good tech invented or paradigm changes by others

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jrflowers 4 hours ago

> IBM invented/developed/introduced magnetic stripe cards, UPC Barcodes, the modern ATM, Hard drives, floppies, DRAM, SQL, the 360 Family of Mainframes, the PC, Apollo guidance computers, Deep Blue. IBM created a far share of the future we're living in.

Well put. “IBM was wrong about computers being a big deal” is a bizarre take. It’s like saying that Colonel Sanders was wrong about chicken because he, uh… invented the pressure fryer.

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