[Info-vax] IBM Layoffs

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-01-27 12:49:54 +0000, Kerry Main said:

> There is a balance required between business acumen, understanding 
> market trends, the culture of the company, and its customers.
> 
> Unfortunately, to many C levels get caught up in the industry hype & 
> the next big thing (SOA, Clouds to name a couple) and make huge 
> investments that later prove to be strategies based on sand.
> 
> Watch IBM and HP over the next 12-18 months for evidence of this.

IBM and HP are large and complex, and have many issues and concerns, 
and varied product lines, but both need to build what the customers 
want to buy.

Assuming that the customers even want to buy their respective products 
and services, of course.

Both IBM and HP can't readily afford to miss a major trend, as that can 
take several years to recover from, if you don't end up either 
acquiring an existing vendor or exiting the market.    IBM and HP 
largely missed mobile, and both are contending with the apparent 
maturation or saturation of the Windows market, and with moderate and 
large customers that can roll their own hardware[1], too.  IBM aligned 
with Apple for mobile, and has exited the Windows and Windows Server 
hardware business.  HP is supposedly only just starting to work their 
way out of their product drought, per the CEO's schedule from several 
years back[2].   Some of the senior HP folks seem to believe  "The 
Machine" is a bet-the-business product, too.[3][4].   Yes, HP was 
marketing cloud services very heavily in past years, jokes aside[5] — 
there was and is a marketing effort around "cloud maps" and related 
services, and more recently around HP Helion.  Helion can be in-house 
or outsourced, and other providers are offering similar products.

Some few folks have the time and the budget and the foresight to try 
new and different things.   Unfortunately, many folks in the trenches — 
and in the suits and C-suites, for that matter — can get caught up with 
how things are now, and can mistakenly assume that's how things will 
always be.   Some will get caught without the budget and the necessary 
process reviews, change requests, and requisite oversight committee 
approvals to allow them to change quickly enough.  Some will not see, 
or will ignore what they are seeing, too caught up in the day-to-day.

Put another way, it'd probably be more interesting to watch what the 
successful vendors and customers and competitors are doing with their 
IT, though — if you're competing with them — you're now a year or three 
and a deployment cycle or three behind them, and now facing the effort 
and cost involved with trying not to become irrelevant.   Whatever you 
think about them, there will be hosted and outsourced services involved 
in any non-trivial application.  Now whether you choose to call that 
cloud services or outsourcing or whatever — that's your call.  But look 
around.


#######
[1] <http://www.opencompute.org>
[2] 
<http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/03/meg-whitman-outlines-hps-5-year-recovery-plan-promises-growth-by-2015/> 

[3] 
<http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/184165-hp-bets-it-all-on-the-machine-a-new-computer-architecture-based-on-memristors-and-silicon-photonics> 

[4] Consider whether VSI is really a "skunk works" project for HP, and 
is really building the new kernel for "The Machine"?   Or is that too 
"JF"?
[5] 
<http://www.theonion.com/video/hp-on-that-cloud-thing-that-everyone-else-is-talki,28789/> 


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