As Sam Palmisano gets ready to retire, expect to see more glowing articles like this by Steve Lohr in the NYT. The man deserves plenty of kudos, but I thought he got carried away for taking credit for “solving societal challenges”?
Let’s compare IBM against a few more modest benchmarks during Sam’s decade.
Against Apple
Everyone says how much smarter IBM was compared to HP by getting out of PCs and printers – in fact, most of its hardware business. How about comparing to what Apple has done with all kinds of gadgets and other hardware?
Against Facebook and Amazon
IBM has a long storied history around data centers. But over the last decade, the real data center innovations have come from web companies and cloud computing vendors. Wall Street likes that IBM margins are fatter from not passing such efficiencies on to customers, but should customers?
Against Salesforce.com and Workday
IBM makes a lot of money from application management and business process outsourcing. But over the last decade, multi-tenancy and shared service efficiencies have come from SaaS vendors who support thousands of customers at a fraction of the labor IBM (and other outsourcers) assign to their application support. While labor economists like the jobs IBM creates, should its customers?
Against Google, Microsoft, Oracle and……
Lotus Notes, Tivoli, DB2, WebSphere were once state of the art and deserved premiums. Today, IBM hopes and prays migration costs intimidate customers into staying put with its products.
Against truly smart customers
IBM cleverly flatters city, healthcare and other “smarter planet” customers with the smart moniker. But truly smart customers have picked up on fact that IBM mostly provides services in such projects and they can get better results with different service providers and technologies.
Sam’s decade will be remembered as one where IBM learned to squeeze value out of aging assets. Now if it can show society how to do something similar, I will be much more willing to credit IBM with “solving societal challenges.”
