IBM had decades of trash CEOs who focused on returning shareholder dividends at the expense of literally everything else.
You know what's really expensive? Employees! Fire the lot. Send their wages to the shareholders and cheaply outsource every job possible.
Ginny (former CEO) spent years turning this around and only just managed in her last quarter or two. Arvind (current CEO) is the first person they've had in forever who has real vision and understands the modern tech industry.
IBM is a big ship to turn but it's slowly modernising and trying to become relevant to more people besides AIX mainframe renewals. Arvind wants IBM Cloud to displace AWS/GCP/Azure which is certainly aiming for the stars. Even if they get 20% of the way there that'll be huge.
I'm not saying IBM is a guaranteed growth share but they at least seem to be out of their death spiral.
Is Nadella doing anything else apart from outsourcing?
I would argue that Microsoft is the same ship as it was with Ballmer, but the times changed a bit, both the software and market matured. But essentially Microsoft still sells the same software mostly to businesses as it was in 2000. Maybe with some sprinkle on top.
Did they manage to get any new product in last 10 years? Windows phone was a failure. Xbox is older? Copilot is licensed from OpenAI?
Google allready went the "jack welch" way - there was a hit piece about it some time ago here on HN. Microsoft still tries to provide backwards compitability, since that's where they get money. But how long? Their last iterarions of products are a net loss of efficiency in the office (new dekstop layout, sharepoint - terrible losses of productivity), so they try very hard to get disrupted.
Let's see, under Nadella's tenure since April 2014, Microsoft:
- releases Windows 10 (2015)
- releases hololens (2015)
- buys Mohjang (2015)
- launches VSCode (2015)
- buys LinkedIn (2015), integrates it into Exchange
- releases Teams (2016) to compete with Slack
- launches Office 365 to compete with GSuite (2017)
- Azure IoT (2018)
- Acquires Github (2018)
- Acquires Zenimax (2020)
- X Box Seres S/X (2020)
- Chrome-based Edge
- launches Windows 11 (2021)
- Buys Activision/Blizzard (2023)
- OpenAI partnership/investment
I'm sure I'm forgetting a ton of impactful things too. We might not like what Microsoft is doing, but it's acquisitions have been brilliant, it's released a lot of impactful open source stuff like VSCode, and it has embraced linux-derived technologies.
You know what's really expensive? Employees! Fire the lot. Send their wages to the shareholders and cheaply outsource every job possible.
Ginny (former CEO) spent years turning this around and only just managed in her last quarter or two. Arvind (current CEO) is the first person they've had in forever who has real vision and understands the modern tech industry.
IBM is a big ship to turn but it's slowly modernising and trying to become relevant to more people besides AIX mainframe renewals. Arvind wants IBM Cloud to displace AWS/GCP/Azure which is certainly aiming for the stars. Even if they get 20% of the way there that'll be huge.
I'm not saying IBM is a guaranteed growth share but they at least seem to be out of their death spiral.