Cringely Predicts IBM 'Disappears Into Red Hat' (cringely.com) 81
Tech pundit Robert X. Cringely has been sharing technology predictions every January for over two decades -- and he made another big one on Friday:
IBM has three divisions — Global Technology Services (GTS), Global Business Services (GBS), and Red Hat. GTS is the legacy IT business, GBS is the professional services business invented by Lou Gerstner to save IBM the last time it was in huge trouble, and Red Hat is Linux. GTS — that part of IBM most of us still think of as IBM — will probably be sold by summer. Either it will go to private equity (depends on the total debt load) or it will be sold to HPE or maybe to Oracle. Either way, it's not a likely success story, but [current CEO Ginni] Rometty has no real choice. IBM is, at this point, smoke, mirrors, and buybacks. The GTS windfall will land in Ginni's final quarter, juicing her payout, which might be the major point of the deal...
IBM's new CEO is Arvind Krishna, formerly head of the Cognitive Computing unit — IBM's cloud guy. Except Cognitive Computing was never really cloud. Cognitive has been a mishmash of cloud, supported by revenue streams that are anything but cloud. It's cloud in name only and will be the part that goes next summer, possibly with Mr. Krishna still at its head.
The next chairman of IBM after Rometty will be current Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst. If Whitehurst is as smart as I think he is, he started yesterday looking for a new job. It's not that he really intends to leave, but as the next savior of IBM, Ginni et al will pay anything to keep him. Cut your new deal now, Jim, while demand is greatest....Whitehurst will turn IBM into Red Hat, which will take HQ to North Carolina and mean most of the remaining GBS staff will be gone in a year...
It still won't save IBM. They'll go down in the coming year or two along with the rest of the industry we used to call IT...
Let's just say that IBM's loss is AWS's gain.
IBM's new CEO is Arvind Krishna, formerly head of the Cognitive Computing unit — IBM's cloud guy. Except Cognitive Computing was never really cloud. Cognitive has been a mishmash of cloud, supported by revenue streams that are anything but cloud. It's cloud in name only and will be the part that goes next summer, possibly with Mr. Krishna still at its head.
The next chairman of IBM after Rometty will be current Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst. If Whitehurst is as smart as I think he is, he started yesterday looking for a new job. It's not that he really intends to leave, but as the next savior of IBM, Ginni et al will pay anything to keep him. Cut your new deal now, Jim, while demand is greatest....Whitehurst will turn IBM into Red Hat, which will take HQ to North Carolina and mean most of the remaining GBS staff will be gone in a year...
It still won't save IBM. They'll go down in the coming year or two along with the rest of the industry we used to call IT...
Let's just say that IBM's loss is AWS's gain.
2012 (Score:5, Insightful)
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IIRC back in the day the Cringely column used to relate tech gossip/rumors - Hedda Hopper for nerds. Connections/sources must've blown enough hot air to inflate an ego - or something.
Re: 2012 (Score:5, Interesting)
That was when a different writer was Cringely. The current Cringely, Mark Stephens, is the third to write under that pen name. Still manages to generate clickbait, though.
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Cringely is a hack who somehow gets paid to write pointless bullshit.
Exactly, which thrives on clickbait, hence this latest man bites dog piece. Historical precedent is rather the opposite: what goes into IBM seldom survives in any recognizable form. Redhat is nothing more than plankton to feed the baleen whale, digestive juices are already at work.
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what goes into IBM seldom survives in any recognizable form. Redhat is nothing more than plankton to feed the baleen whale, digestive juices are already at work.
IBM recently acquired Weather Underground. The first thing they did was uglify the app.
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There goes that.
Not even wrong! But *useless*! (Score:3)
Would he reliably be wrong, then he'd be a very useful source of predictions. /dev/random.
But he's probably not better than
Why do people never get, that real-world logic is always ternary: true, false, useless.
Or, to be even more precise, a two-dimensional gradient: useless-useful and true-false. (Think of uselessness as transparencyy and truth as the color.)
Re: Not even wrong! But *useless*! (Score:2)
You know you're on Slashdot when the car analogy has been upgraded to Photoshop analogies. (works for me =)
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The great thing about "predictions" is that noblody ever keeps track of them.
It's usually nobody, but in this case that's done by the man who made them [cringely.com]. He usually goes back every year and grades his own predictions.
Re: 2012 (Score:2)
Yes, and judges his own predictions extremely leniently. He claimed his prediction for a self-spreading Alexa virus that could cause havoc in home networks was proven true because a group of whitehats with physical access to an Alexa device was able to hack that individual device.
I forgot they even exist (Score:2)
Cognos right?
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Now APT rules the world. Sorry RPM, not sorry.
Who has enough money to buy IBM GTS? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the mainframes, power systems, research, and what else?
Considering IBM's patent portfolio, just who has enough money?
Cringely suggests:
Private equity - that'll need to be a consortium, but there shouldn't be any shortage of potential members.
HPE - unlikely. The outflow of talent from the three sections above would leave them unviable.
Oracle - that's a joke. Ditto.
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HPE - unlikely. The outflow of talent from the three sections above would leave them unviable.
Oracle - that's a joke. Ditto./quote>
The joke here is Robert X. Cringeworthy.
Through some sort of legal maneuvering he aquired the rights to the name Robert X. Cringely some years ago. There is no such actual person. Robert X. Cringely is a pseudonym that has been used by a number of people over the past 35+ years. The current Cringley claims to be the original who has been writing since 1987 (he's not).
His one great accomplishment is that he someohow gets paid to writing nonsense.
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Re: Who has enough money to buy IBM GTS? (Score:2)
It's not - it spilt into 2 some years back. Do try and keep up.
Re:Who has enough money to buy IBM GTS? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the mainframes, power systems, research, and what else?
Considering IBM's patent portfolio, just who has enough money?
Cringely suggests:
Private equity - that'll need to be a consortium, but there shouldn't be any shortage of potential members.
If the goal is to pump up numbers then selling the patent portfolio makes sense. Companies like Amazon, Apple, MS, Samsung et. al. could create corporation to buy the patents with everyone gaining access to them. The question is whether the patent portfolio is worth more than bundled with GTS. IBM could split them while assuring the GTS buyer access to them via a reasonable license deal.
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> That's the mainframes, power systems, research, and what else?
None of it is part of GTS, cringely doesn't even know how the company is currently organized.
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If the cash flow is negative it doesn't matter how well invested you are in patents, at some point it's just an empty shell with expiring patents.
"Expriring" (Score:3)
Tell that to Disney. ^^
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Tell that to Disney. ^^
Huh? Yeah, I'm sure Disney has some patents, but I think you are confusing patents with trademarks and copyrights (which are Disney's real lifeblood).
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Disney should stick to animated stuff. People watching that don't care about plot gaps and incoherent stuff.
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Wait till you find [youtube.com] out [youtube.com] about YouTube! /s
People will kvetch about anything.
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Patent terms last for 20 years, which is too long for blatantly obvious things such as VMs. Its nothing more than an extortion scheme since it does not take anything special more than a few minutes to come up with such ideas. Say no to Software Patents.
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Drunk (Score:5, Insightful)
It is just another drunken shitpost predicting the end of the IT sector within 2 years.
It seems he can't comprehend IBM's Professional Services division, because he has a bunch of hangups about the first guy who ran it.
All he knows about IBM or RedHat and what they do is who the top managers are.
And then he talks politics.
High (Score:1)
They'll go down in the coming year or two along with the rest of the industry we used to call IT.
That's some good weed you've got there, Robert. Please pass it around will you?
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Actually that makes sense... "avoid the noid!" The world isn't ending, calm down, drink some milk.
ANOTHER prediction that mainframes will die? (Score:3)
Oh FFS. Pundits have been predicting this since the 90's. And they're still wrong.
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Oh FFS. Pundits have been predicting this since the 90's. And they're still wrong.
Cringely was probably the one braying the loudest back in the 90s. I was surprised to, just now, discover he is "only" 67 - he's always seemed like some rather old and out of touch crotchety guy who somehow managed to get a job writing about tech.
Re: ANOTHER prediction that mainframes will die? (Score:2)
That's because apparently, it's a pseudonym.
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All the supercomputer companies did die, but Cray came back. Not the same Cray, but something like it.
Cringely predicts? (Score:3)
I rarely think of IBM anymore (Score:3)
When I was kid programmer back in the '70s IBM was regarded as this unbeatable behemoth whose ever exhale became a defacto industry standard. But only in the "business" world.
Everybody else knew all about DEC and CDC Data General and a plethora of other players all now long dead and gone but IBM remains. At the time we mostly ignored them except when we couldn't and made up names for them:
IBM: Idiots Built Me
IBM: Ingrained Batch Mentality
IBM: Idled Blue Machine.
and so on. I remember OS/360 was so arcane that it took three consultants at the medical center where I was trying to run a job to help me work out the control cards. Big lesson: If it wasn't documented as a cookbook just forget it -- it couldn't be done.
But damn .. they made money. Still do. Anyone who thinks they will wither away and go the way of the aforementioned long-dead competitors is dreaming.
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It does take some time for a gas giant to slowly consume its fuel and slowly run down. IBM share price is been on a steady down ramp for eight years now, exactly the opposite of the index. Somewhat ameliorated by dividends but still a bad deal for owners.
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Scuse me, please spell that "red giant". Or would that be blue giant?
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IMHO, blue giants consume their fuel quickly.
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Oops, it seems I didn't notice the pun. My bad. Please disregard my previous message.
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:-)
The bigger a star, the quicker it dies. (Score:2)
Dwarf stars actually live many orders of magnitude longer. :)
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and so on. I remember OS/360 was so arcane that it took three consultants at the medical center where I was trying to run a job to help me work out the control cards. Big lesson: If it wasn't documented as a cookbook just forget it -- it couldn't be done.
Actually, the IBM mainframe OSes (OS/MVS/z-OS, DOS/VSE/z-VSE, VM/z-VM) were and are among the most user-friendly mainframe operating systems. One can try Unisys OS2200, for example, to see what I'm talking about. (I believe an evaluation copy can still be downloaded from Unisys together with an emulator to run it on a PC). IMHO, in addition to IBM OSes only the OSes for PDP-10 and perhaps Multics among mainframe OSes could be called somewhat user-friendly, and everything else was as arcane as Sumerian cunei
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For years I though IBM gear was just boring beige boxes. Then I started seeing what the old enterprise systems were like. Large racks like the S/390 or ES/9000 and they are so different and amazingly complicated. There really isn't anything else like it. These boxes had microcode loaded from the "support element" or external PC. It also configured the hardware as well because you could hang drive arrays or terminal controllers or even tape arrays on the same bus. Now being IBM the software on the support el
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IBM: Idled Blue Machine. and so on. I remember OS/360 was so arcane that it took three consultants at the medical center where I was trying to run a job to help me work out the control cards.
From internal - IBM: I've Been Moved
// JOB (LIMITS=5M,RAM=512KB)
// EXEC FORT66 OPTION=CLG
//DATA SYSIN *
/*
// EXEC MOAR
//DATA SYSIN *
//
Not that it matters, but back in the day (late 80's?) I was offered a job to put Unix on the IBM AS/400. Also: 3 consultants for 360 job control!?! ("I'm not positive, so let me call in help so we can ALL justify our jobs.")
C YOUR DATA GOES HERE
10 WRITE (6,*) 'PENIS'
20 GOTO 10
DONT DROP ME OR YOU GET TO UNSHUFFLE ME
Sorry, it's only been 40 years sinc
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Wish I could upvote you. Looks like you've been there.
As I recall my job involved mounting three tapes and temporary disk storage. My FORTRAN program was doing a sort/merge then something else type of function. Damn near broke the bank.
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"put Unix on the IBM AS/400"
Now *that* would be an interesting job, but I can't for the life of me figure out *why* anyone would want to do that.
AIX/RS6000 was already a thing, and OS400 was and is so much better an operating system for its intended audience.
Of course, today it all runs on Power systems, but I'd still take OS400 over any *nix (for business cases, not research).
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It's quite hard to kill the company that sells the agents to the matrix.
Whitehurst for CEO?? (Score:2)
Whitehurst presided over Redhat losing the data center to Ubuntu and Debian. Why would IBM look forward to applying those skills to its own business?
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IBM still has the Nazgul.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Your perception conflicts with reality. Ubuntu 35.8%, Debian 31.9%, CentOS 20.6%, Red Hat (RHEL) 3.3% [wikipedia.org] Redhat only gets revenue from the latter, 3.3% of the market. It wasn't always this way. Redhat increased its revenue lately only by squeezing more money out of its shrinking market share. That's a losing game, that's why Redhat paid the corporate death penalty.
DXC (Score:2)
I hope after spinning off enterprise services into DXC (as employees say, pronounced the way you write it: dicks), HPE won't be taking over IBM's mess. I don't think they'll be gone in a couple of years, but it won't be a pretty business. In some form these IT service giants are going to be aro
You know the old saying ... (Score:5, Funny)
GTS — that part of IBM most of us still think of as IBM — will probably be sold by summer.
Nobody gets fired for buying IBM. :-)
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Nobody gets fired for buying IBM. :-)
My personal favorite is something a co-worker told me on a job I worked about 20 years ago. We had some IBM AIX servers on that job. He told me about IBM "You might find better elsewhere, but you'll never pay more!".
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Careful or this article will clog the toilet (Score:2)
> It still won't save IBM. They'll go down in the coming year or two along with the rest of the industry we used to call IT..
Oh well then better find a building to jump off since I'm in IT and the whole industry is going, right? Or maybe instead I take this article and chop it up nice and small so it doesn't clog my toilet.
Glass ball fortune tellers? Really?? (Score:2)
Are we really still doing this crap?
Has he ever been right more than any random person in the tech sector? Or even more than the statistical random amount?
Quit giving this tech Kardashian attention, please.
"Tech hack Cringely" (Score:1)
I predict the sky is falling.
There's more faith in what I predict than what Cringely spews.
Any /. article that quotes a quotes a guy saying "I..." is a waste of time. This isn't about one person prognosticating the future (which he obviously -- based on past events -- has no clude about). It's about technical matters, science, and reality.
Sorry, EditorIdiot and Cringely. IBM is going nowhere. Go short your stock elsewhere.
Ehud
Tucson AZ US
Cringely knows how to bullshit (Score:1)
The problem is that all what he talks about is bullshit. How come he failed so gravely with his Minecraft server? It's a shame how he used his reputation to rob people of their money. And why would anyone need a special hardware for a server for this ridiculous game?
But that's another thing.
I stopped trusting him long ago, after this art
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Very funny,
or perhaps you don't understand. The proper form is
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Re: Ya buried the lede: Trump gets deepstated (Score:2)
Oddly enough, it was the Justice Department.
What's there to predict? (Score:2)
Highly Doubtful (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with so many tech journalists today is that they get paid to get attention. Controversy is an easy way to attention. However, it does also tend to energize thought on a subject.
IBM has some truly awesome assets and technologies. The Z-Series has awesome levels of unrealized potential and so do the the Power Systems. IBM should make a bigger push as a cloud provider.
I am not sure but I sense that IBM is suffering from internal hierarchicalism and "budget and schedule" bean counting, the former of which has terribly plagued the software industry over the last decade. Quality and productivity both tend to suffer, as one can most famously see with Beoing and their 737 Max, recently (and yet their new CEO is of the same philosophy and is already starting by not tolerating the kinds of comments engineers made about the plane being designed by clowns -- instead of improving communication and LISTENING to their concerns).
In general terms, IBM needs to do two things:
(1) Hugely improve quality. Just last year I earnestly tried to build a voice-enabled agent using IBM's online APIs but found the Node.js tool too broken to use effectively for it. IBM has the talent so the problem is clearly (as it often is) in management. If you must--throw out the old business managers and bring up the engineers. They know how to work with other engineers. Flatten the organizational structure and put people in charge of the quality of particular products and services -- eliminating all kinds of time tracking and bean counting systems (unless they are passive). Stop tormenting employees with worrying about how to justify each and every hour on the payroll. Instead, judge them on the quality of products and services they produce. Everything else--schedule and budget will come into line. Otherwise, it'll only grow worse..
(2) Focus services on old and new areas of demand. For example, it's very hard to build mobile apps today even though mobile apps are in high demand. So provide a tool akin to Google Firebase that's even easier to use than is Google Firebase. I have used Firebase and it's great except it has two problems--(1) learning curve and (2) scary billing (programming errors can accidentally cost you hugely in billing). Reducing the learning curve is always the biggest and best way to gain new products they rely on IBM services and thereby bring in residual income. You have to focus on planting that seed. And also keep in mind that you should not create a low learning curve by dumbing down products. They also need to be flexible enough to solve the broadest range of problems. Otherwise, your customers won't stay. A simple way to make simple yet not inflexible is by a general philosophy of defaults. For example, build a shell of a mobile app for a particular role and let the user then customize from the default of the general role. It must be simple.. and you must facilitate and moderate a user community to mutually provide friendly help to each other.
The general formula for a new product or service with massive popularity is: (1) quick and easy to learn; and (2) can do many creative and useful things. For example when HTML came out, 12 year olds were making cool little colorful web pages. And you can do a lot with web pages. However, developing web applications or even web pages today is an entirely different story.. It's very complicated even to do simple things. There is no need for that.. It's just over-engineered, as happens to most many popular technologies over time. The next big thing is something that relieves us developers from that tyranny.
And one more thing. Red Hat seems to be a company with similar tendencies to IBM. They are also not producing quality, lately or even for some time. They aren't really innovating, either..
--Matthew C. Tedder
Anything... (Score:2)
that causes Lennart Poettering to lose his meal ticket and he has to go back to competing on (non) merit instead of having a 600 lbs gorilla shoving his crap into every major Linux distribution.
His Past Predictions of IBM are all wrong (Score:3)
IBM isn't going anywhere (Score:2)
Anyone who thinks IBM is going to disappear clearly doesn't know how many people still use IBM mainframes (the IBM z15 being the latest from big blue)
Plus they have a huge patent portfolio and aren't afraid to use it.
Yes (Score:1)
Let's reduce IBM to "gain for AWS" (or whatever) because of Cringely. :'-)
I've spent 10 years of my life at IBM (until 2017) and met a bunch of smart and driven people there (yeah, not all of them); IBM invested in me and I learned lessons from my colleagues that help me to this day.
"IBMers don't believe in certifications" LOL! IBM probably invented them.
What a joy it is to realize at some client afterwards that this client doesn't have the most basic understanding of management - which you previously took
IBM (traditional IT) will disappear... (Score:2)
...just in time to be reborn as businesses look at the latest Azure "perfect 10.0" vulnerability and realize that it's not unique to Azure, it's an inherent property of all cloud providers. If you run anything on someone else's hardware that's shared with other customers, you're always vulnerable to other customers gaining access to the shared hardware and provider infrastructure and you're always at the mercy of the provider to fix the problem. If you have sensitive applications and data that you absolutel