What's humorous to me is the lack of IBM in this equation. IBM used to be the big-swinging-bollocks in this whole industry and now they're a giant patent portfolio with a consulting department.

Talk about removing yourself from the equation to save shareholder value.

IBM's money is in customer support. They could teach Google something about how thrive as a business while almost all their customers have infrastructures that were built on now years-dead technology. Of course IBM's customers are massive orgs that can afford hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars contracts in exchange for having skilled technical staff available 24/7; most of Google's customers aren't.

It's not that IBM isn't interested in innovating, it's that anything they come up with has to struggle for support within an institution making billions of dollars a year iterating on decades-old hardware, because they're set up to do business with companies as big as they are, which tend to be technologically conservative. IBM isn't really set up to market products* to consumers and small businesses that are going to be more willing to take a flyer on things that are barely ready for prime time.

*(...and these days marketing has to be not only to the end user and/or corporate buyer, but often also to the variety of third parties that are needed to provide the accessories and mods for a thriving aftermarket.)

If the only advice a company can offer is "answer the phone for paying customers" then IBM has truly fallen behind the curve. 😀

Yeah, where are their glory days when they had technicians right in the middle of concentration camps, keeping their Hollerith machines ticking along as they helped Hitler carry out the Holocaust? (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ibm-holocaust_b_1301691)

PS. It’s ok, they haven’t changed that much, their current CEO was the first tech exec to write to Trump publicly offering him anything he needed (https://www.ibm.com/blogs/policy/ibm-ceo-ginni-romettys-letter-u-s-president-elect/). Also, they did some innovative work with Duterte (https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2019/03/20/inside-the-video-surveillance-program-ibm-built-for-philippine-strongman-rodrigo-duterte/) #ibm