Only beaten by Lenovo.
After the company rebranded itself to Lenovo, it merged with IBM's PC business which produced its ThinkPad line in 2005, after which it rapidly expanded abroad. In 2013, Lenovo became the world's largest personal computer vendor by unit sales for the first time, a position it still holds as of 2024.They basically bought IBM's good reputation name and style and used it for both IBM-alikes and budget machines.
Some of it was good machines, some of it was crap.
So Thinkpads are still designed in ex-IBM Lenovo Japan
https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/clock-and-timing/co...
It's as if I bought an old telephone exchange building and called it Bell Labs.
I'm sure artificial IBM will be much more... Principled.
[1] https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/many-employees-ibm-2026-la...
indeed, child, indeed.
I had a former student go there around 2008 and it seemed like the vibes were starting to sour around then. They maintained some awesome researchers in, e.g., databases, but I think the "make sure you are showing closely how your research directly contributes to services revenue" thing was strong by then and somewhat ruinous for how pleasant a work experience it was for many.
A slow, long slide through mediocrity into irrelevance...
<joking>
Maybe IBM is signalling it is likewise hoping for 10 billion dollars while also realizing the (AI) partner might not end up being that helpful either??
<further joking>
Someone decided that this feedback was worth highlighting:
"Bob demonstrated a level of intelligence and contextual understanding that goes beyond anything I've seen in other tools. Bob goes beyond anything I've seen in other tools."
I realise LinkedIn is a surrealist caricature of corporate reality, but just imagine proudly displaying your #1 shill award for all to see
I don't think it's a caricature of reality at all, it very much is like the large US corps I've worked at.
I wish IBM got better at product again, and took themselves off the services and consulting morphine they've been on for ~35 years now since OS/2 Warp flopped. Their 1980s/1990s hardware was great. Their software actually was great until Win95 took their lunch money. They've just slunk off into a corner hugging their old architectures they have a moat around, and thrown out some audacious nonsense like Watson now and again, but nothing has stuck. When is somebody in that organisation going to try and innovate properly again?
I'm not sure this is the answer I'd be rooting for.
The commercial guy I dealt with made it very clear that a primary concern was IBM not being humiliated and shafted like their MS dealings. It colored our commercial arrangements, which had to include "break glass" arrangements for them to gain full access to our source code.
It's actually one of the reasons that open source took off in the early 2000s - if the source was already available all you needed to do was come up with a legal agreement that says something to the effect of "EnterpriseCo has a limited license to use SmallCo's software which reverts to full rights in the event that SmallCo is unable to carry out its obligations", with no need to bother arranging (and paying for) escrow.
That made it easier and cheaper to deal with open source companies, and made escrow seem weird and expensive by comparison. But in the 90s it was almost universal in those sort of contracts.
Calling Bob (the server) a piece of shit ("Bob is a piece of shit") because it crashed again was a very risky move that we often didn't fully think through.
They have been expanding their portfolio through acquisitions: Red Hat, HashiCorp, Confluent...
[Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_the_Builder_(character) ]
I used to think everyone called (cobs|bread cakes|rolls|barns) muffins, and it turns out it was just my small town that did it. As in, just my small town, not region, county, etc.
UK regional dialects are summed up really well here because despite listing five different names for a specific thing you still neglected the word I use (baps).
I ask because i'm only familiar with a thread/yarn bobbin, I wonder if it derived from that.
(So obviously those calling them cobs or rolls or whatever else are just wrong!)
This allows them to take the secondary revenue in-house and potentially fund a new mainframe business.
It's a [smart-ish because it's their only] strategy for the near term, because long term businesses will be moving off their mainframes and onto more powerful and intelligent systems that can 'think'.
Business Machines 1.0 were CRUD; if they pull this off they can at least get enough capital to maybe upgrade business machines to 2.0
Good on them for at least trying.
When you stop paying but keep using the skill, that’s called pirating.
signed: a proud IBMer
"claude, get this c++ program working"
these types of moats are all but obliterated.
If you're launching something 2 years late, you've got to do better than this.
I'm also sticking to first-party agents, but that's more because I feel no compelling reason to switch and CLI agents fit well with my spartan technology choices. YMMV.
I agree IBM Bob is not the revolution, but…
We are still in the punch card era of LLMs. Maybe even the Altair era.
None of this stuff has really been figured out yet.