That's not really a solution to anything. Websphere is used and essential to lots of companies. They might hate the software but they'd hate hearing it being end-of-life'd even more.
With a company of IBM's size, there's no need to move people from Webpshere to some other project. You can shake out a few dozen engineers from anywhere without their managers even noticing.
Firing a few thousand bureaucrats would go a longer way toward improving product quality than ending product lines.
I think IBM should stop selling the ultra crap software that is selling right now like Websphere commerce and all the crappy enterprisey stuff. They really need something good to change and if layoffs are for the better, it's probably worth trying. If the plan is to keep this stuff going, it's gonna be bad.
The quote I mentioned is just a quote, but it points to a part of a reason. If you are a CEO or a high level executive of a big company, going with IBM or Oracle is a safe bet. It's not very likely you will be blamed for failures of IBM or Oracle. It may be a money hole and bad for business but it's a much safer bet than going with some smaller vendor instead of big name vendors.
I was working for a UN organisation last year and some of my work overlapped with another project that was being done by IBM. They were hired to make our web applications more secure by adding 2FA and user access control middleware, using their Websphere family of products (IIRC) and building custom integrations.
I didn't get involved much on the project, but from what I understand the developers sent to work with us were useless, the products were bad or at least poorly suited for us, and what they were going to build was a huge waste of money. (However the last point was more to do with deep organisational issues where I was working).
The main product IBM sold was 'mininising risk' which the director of our department loved - as it meant if the project failed he would have someone to take the blame other than himself. The old saying 'nobody got fired for choosing IBM' is still true.
As someone who used to work in/on/underneath websphere. I can tell you I am loathe to even consider anything IBM. I was almost recruited by them and then I recalled how miserable I was on one particular project. The money was good but I said no. I recommend everyone I mean to stay away from IBM and Oracle as best I can. I just don't think the line between open source and enterprise is crystal clear anymore.
If you're working for a large, bureaucratic organization, producing a radically different solution can be a career-limiting move, even if it's a success and the problem is quite important. (Or perhaps especially if it's quite important.)
A behemoth like IBM takes a while to die. I've read a bit about IBM. They are toast, the market for mainframes, server racks and expensive enterprise service packages is disappearing.
IBM has been reorg-ing itself to death for 15 years (that I'm aware of, probably more). The IBMers I know used to think they were just trying to downplay the perception of downsizing by doing it in rounds and under other organizational shifts.
It's become clear that the company has no direction. The only thing management knows how to do is rearrange the deckchairs on the titanic, so they'll just continue doing that until they sink.
No where is this more clear than in the withered husks of plants still online because somewhere in shutting them down someone realized "oh yeah, this shit makes us money." And keeping the plant operational is contacted out at exorbitant rates, sometimes to the exact same people laid off from that position at that location over a decade ago.
You don’t grok “the enterprise”. Any CTO of a large company would feel much better about having VMWare behind them and their ecosystem than your proposed solution.
“No one ever got fired for buying IBM” applies equally to big enterprise SaaS providers and companies like Oracle, Microsoft, VMWare, Salesforce, etc.
Well I had similar experience IBM people. We had one small change request for our IBM websphere MQ setup. It was raised when I joined the project and they could not complete it by the time I left after 1 year. Multiple times they canceled our request ticket. And this whole setup was managed by IBM in their data centers.
Look, IBM has to start navigating that product into a mountainside at some point. It's always best to start with user goodwill so the knowledgeable individuals start bailing out. They have to get the number of experts down to a level where IBM has most of them under contract to their customers. That way in 20 years they can cease real support and development while still getting millions in annual revenue.
With a company of IBM's size, there's no need to move people from Webpshere to some other project. You can shake out a few dozen engineers from anywhere without their managers even noticing.
Firing a few thousand bureaucrats would go a longer way toward improving product quality than ending product lines.
reply