"IBM hasn’t dominated the tech industry since the early 1980s. Most founders today weren’t even born when the last antitrust case was opened into it. The share price is up 9x since then, and IBM shipped its highest-ever volume of mainframe computing capacity in…. 2020!"[1]
Never played around with one. But it must be working so reliably well in some specific field ( I am guessing Accounting and Finance ) that those end users, not engineers or IT, but actual people using the system dont want it to be replaced, only upgraded.
If it is dying, it will be a slow death. IBM spent decades entrenching itself in government and Fortune 500 enterprises.
The 23 year old Ruby-on-Rails coder sitting at his desk in his unicorn's open floorplan office in SoMa may not be aware of it, but there are a ton of IBM machines out there in the world right now, running programs written in JCL, Rexx, Cobol, PL/I, and Fortran.
The first z196 mainframe to roll out six years ago went to Citigroup ( http://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/global-cio-ibms... ). With the pressure for increasing quarterly profits and other priorities, why would Citigroup decide to spend a fortune to upgrade their ancient legacy systems, hoping that there won't be too many bumps along the way? IBM makes it easy for them to keep their legacy systems around - it's much cheaper, and it works. The systems have worked for decades actually.
When JPMorgan Chase decided to start cutting down on their IBM usage twelve years ago and start doing more IT in house, they had to strike a deal with IBM to hire about 4000 IBM IT workers ( http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/7294.wss ). Since JPMC just put up a job posting ( https://jpmchase.taleo.net/careersection/jobdetail.ftl?job=1... ) looking for someone with "Expert Skills in IBM-Z/OS COBOL, CICS, VSAM, JCL, MQ, DB2 SQL, Assembler and Stored Procedures", I'd guess some of those systems are still in place.
Note the location of the job. Tampa, Florida. Not exactly the center of what's young and hot in the tech world. More like the kind of place an IBM old timer might go to retire, before he decides he was bored and would like to stick his hand back in and get some work. This JPMC job ( https://jpmchase.taleo.net/careersection/jobdetail.ftl?job=1... ) looking for "Experience with z/OS ISPF, JCL, and JES2" is in Bangalore. Not the center of tech, but plenty of people out there are working on these mainframes and with languages listed in the job listings like JCL, REXX, Cobol etc. These jobs are all at a bank which tried to start weaning itself off IBM twelve years ago.
Governments and Fortune 500 companies have plenty of IBM mainframes out there running, often with code written half a century ago in PL/I or the like, running business processes which are still used, and they're not going away any time soon.
> IBM created the PC, and was influential in a lot of critical areas. Now they are just...there. They make revenue pushing up towards Microsoft levels, but you can safely completely ignore them.
You can? I assume you don't work in Global2000 Enterprise IT?
Well, that's completely ahistorical. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" was due to conservatism and idiocy on the part of managers and businesspeople, not to mention... you know... IBM's monopoly power and the advantages that went along with that. During the bulk of the minicomputer and mainframe era it had little or nothing to do with the relative quality of IBM's stuff.
This is not true. IBM produces a ton of software (spanning a range from terrible to excellent, quality-wise). This is where much of their profit comes from now. They still produce a bunch of hardware, mostly at the higher (and legacy) end.
> Does anyone else remember the days when "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" was true? You might pay a little extra, but it was never a total fail to use IBM products.
I never though of it that way but rather as a CYA move.
> They're a waste of engineering talent and have contributed nothing to the world.
That's arguably true now...but to claim that IBM hasn't contributed anything to the world is just hyperbole. I mean, they invented the relational database and hard drive, and practically every modern computing concept is just a reimplementation of what existed on a mainframe.
>IBM makes some big systems. To me, it's not terribly surprising they'd be willing to part with their lower-end units. Mainframes are where the money is for IBM.
Yup. even if that's only 10% of their revenue, I bet it's a lot more of their profit. Margins on assembling servers are driven down by massive competition, and by the fact that it's really difficult to 'differentiate' x86; your product is the same microchips as the competition on very similar boards in very similar metal boxes. (Which isn't to say the margins are zero, it's just that the customer has a lot more negotiation ammo. Your sales person has to work a lot harder.)
This situation is very good for the consumer, of course; they can reasonably play one supplier off of five. But it isn't as great for the suppliers.
> (and then there's a matter of time and prioritization; heck, I work for IBM -- if I tried to counter every negative comment on IBM on Hacker News, that'd be my six new full time jobs, even though I've personally had brilliantly positive experience over two decades and deeply respect all of my colleagues :D )
i've always written ibm off as large, old and stodgy. curious to hear a counterpoint if you're willing to share.
You know, I could take that postingand make some wording changes.
"And, in this case, history says, IBM will always be key to a central computing-centric world....For now minicomputers seem to have the baton, but as we move into a very rich data environment....No matter what, no-one is going to trust their corporate data entirely to desktop computers. They will share it there, but not leave it there." and so forth.
This would have seemed very plausible thirty years ago, when IBM was dominant. And, indeed, nobody pushed IBM out of the dinosaur pens. There are still IBM mainframes out there, and they don't have much competition in the mainframe business. Of course, IBM wasn't pushing anything as relatively bad as Vista in those days.
Microsoft isn't going to die because of being pushed off the desktop, unless they do it themselves with increasingly unusable operating systems. They will cease to be relevant as applications become less tied to the underlying desktop OS, much as IBM ceased to be relevant as data became less tied to the central mainframe.
Never played around with one. But it must be working so reliably well in some specific field ( I am guessing Accounting and Finance ) that those end users, not engineers or IT, but actual people using the system dont want it to be replaced, only upgraded.
[1] https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1408469812318195716
reply