Something I find myself doing when I stumble through the saloon doors of a Hacker News link only to be met by a silent corporate stare, is to imagine real humans doing real human things. Like drinking their coffee, finishing their milk soup with marshmallows, and seeing their kids off to school.
They each get in their car, fasten their seatbelt, and back out of their storage bay onto the road. They tune their radio to a morning zoo being visited by a reeling ninth caller who didn’t win the free party pack.
They depart the trunk line and park in a fragmented matrix of similarly unique cars, de-safety their belt, rummage the console for an identity token, and head into their own morning zoo, paned wall-to-wall with one-way glass, seemingly installed backwards.
The humans shed the remaining vestiges of their real human mornings and dutifully touch base on how to liven up their portable document that contentfully explores, ”how can technology further deliver value to our audience?” perhaps using hypertext, while drinking more coffee.
Anyways… If you haven’t clicked “client value” at the top-right, I strongly encourage doing so. Ten points and a free party pack if you can read the entire thing with a straight face.
> Bolster our client’s technology strategies by exploring alignments with service, product, and technology directions laid out by both IBM and the client’s preferred partners.
It's my favorite thing to read statements like this that somehow provide negative information.
I was pulled into a meeting once at a startup years ago where they were asking some of the engineers to review the company's new core values and they were all like this. We nodded along, because who wants to tell the HR director that these aren't human (and generally speaking, don't matter). On the bright side, I got to poke fun at our core values of "Having fun" that had a bunch of zany and goofy emoji faces suffixed onto it.
It seems to be describing a series of high-end sales calls, in the form of a management consulting engagement, with the question of, "How can I send IBM more business, and can you help me make slide decks to pitch this idea internally?"
That's not necessarily bad. You could do a lot worse on vendors or consultants.
(And what's the saying? "Nobody ever got fired for hitching their wagon to an IBM sales team.")
> Anyways… If you haven’t clicked “client value” at the top-right, I strongly encourage doing so. Ten points and a free party pack if you can read the entire thing with a straight face.
Love the ending! "They don't reflect reality! If they reflected reality then the values of a company like Boeing would be Not. Quite. Enough. Bolts. But that's not their values, that's not their values. Their values are - and I swear I'm not making this up - their actual values are Safety, Quality, Integrity, Transparency. Well James In fairness, their planes are very transparent. They do deliver on transparency, that is true."
> Anyways… If you haven’t clicked “client value” at the top-right, I strongly encourage doing so. Ten points and a free party pack if you can read the entire thing with a straight face.
That's a bit cruel. I just won the party pack, but lost all desire to enjoy anything in the process.
Oh dear. Looks like I’m not taking home the party pack.
Semi-seriously I’m wondering though: when did corporate rhetoric shift from “creating value” - which almost makes rapacious capitalism sound benign - to shamelessly “capturing” that value? It’s as if they want to give the Marxists a reason to think they were right all along.
IBM would come off so much better if they just stuck to the one thing they still do really well. Investors can be taken on high impact tours of the physical facilities that have been purpose built around IBM's hardware if they need any convincing of the value proposition into 2030.
The AI and quantum roadmaps are an albatross for a company like this. They'll always come up in 2nd place or worse. The competition is insane. Meanwhile, there are maybe 3 other humans on earth with the means and conviction to build a competitor to their mainframe business today. It's one of the better moats in technology. It's not the biggest or most lucrative one, but no one wants to touch it because the captive audience would never risk an alternative.
Data is still IBM's best hope. It's always what they've done well. Especially the very important "core" data of complex enterprises. Things like the account balances and transactions for all customers at a bank. DB2 is easily the most compelling mainframe service and I don't ever see that changing.
> The AI and quantum roadmaps are an albatross for a company like this.
I compare those (long-term roadmaps) with automakers showing-off concept-cars, and I like what John Gruber wrote about those[1]:
> Concept designs (and worse, concept videos) are a sign of dysfunction and incompetence at a company. It’s playing make-believe while fooling yourself and your audience into thinking you’re doing something real. Concepts allow designers to ignore real-world constraints: engineering, pricing, manufacturing, legal regulations, sometimes even physics. But dealing with real-world constraints is the hard work of true design. Concepts don’t stem from a lack of confidence. They stem from a dereliction of the actual duties of design.
Similarly, this vacuous concept-of-a roadmap from IBM is clearly free from real-world constraints; constraints like AI telling people to eat rocks...
IBM in the past has seemed more interested in maximizing the value of their current technologies than trying to predict and guide future technologies.
For example:
1. They missed the move to Cloud and eventually shifted focus to "hybrid" cloud, which allowed them to keep selling their existed software and hardware.
2. They missed the move to SaaS, trying instead to sell expensive on-prem enterprise software like Notes and Commerce, both of which they eventually sold to HCL.
3. Even though they were pioneers in virtualization, they were more interested in bundling their software on expensive appliances than enabling it to run in VMs.
The one thing they can predict is when something is on the verge of commoditization, at which point they decide it's too difficult to make money on and sell it off, e.g. PCs, laptops, hard drives, POS systems.
A common meme on HN, where startup founders meet and hope to win at least 1% of IBM money, while using tools that wouldn't exist if IBM did not decide to cut down costs with Aix and sponsor Linux back in 1998.
Can we agree that in the age of LLMs, their client value content is a good indicator of under performance, at least from their content team? I mean, this entire doc can just be prompted into existence in 30 seconds, has no substance whatsoever.
The only place where they seem to have anything novel and done a ton of research is quantum computing. But even then I have zero idea where they fit into all the competition in that space, whether or not it all just smoke and mirrors or what the enterprise use cases will be. I’ve worked there twice and this “Atlas” is very very on brand.
If you gradually give up on engineering design and manufacturing, then all that's left is catching trends and convincing investors that you will succeed in the race to the next big thing.
But I like it, you can expect some of these terms more frequently in upcoming years, which can shape your investment decisions. People buy the hype, if you are early in the hype cycle you can increase your investments
I thought this would be like a history of their products from the punch card machines up through now, and I was very curious. When I saw that it's about their modern corpo slop services, I instantly clicked off. Sad!
Something I find myself doing when I stumble through the saloon doors of a Hacker News link only to be met by a silent corporate stare, is to imagine real humans doing real human things. Like drinking their coffee, finishing their milk soup with marshmallows, and seeing their kids off to school.
They each get in their car, fasten their seatbelt, and back out of their storage bay onto the road. They tune their radio to a morning zoo being visited by a reeling ninth caller who didn’t win the free party pack.
They depart the trunk line and park in a fragmented matrix of similarly unique cars, de-safety their belt, rummage the console for an identity token, and head into their own morning zoo, paned wall-to-wall with one-way glass, seemingly installed backwards.
The humans shed the remaining vestiges of their real human mornings and dutifully touch base on how to liven up their portable document that contentfully explores, ”how can technology further deliver value to our audience?” perhaps using hypertext, while drinking more coffee.
Anyways… If you haven’t clicked “client value” at the top-right, I strongly encourage doing so. Ten points and a free party pack if you can read the entire thing with a straight face.
Direct link: https://ibm.com/roadmaps/client-value.pdf
Yeah, that's some seriously ultra-processed corporate-speak mumbo-jumbo.
I upvoted the OP only because of your comment.
Many others on HN will, like me, scoff at the OP but appreciate your comment.
> Bolster our client’s technology strategies by exploring alignments with service, product, and technology directions laid out by both IBM and the client’s preferred partners.
It's my favorite thing to read statements like this that somehow provide negative information.
I was pulled into a meeting once at a startup years ago where they were asking some of the engineers to review the company's new core values and they were all like this. We nodded along, because who wants to tell the HR director that these aren't human (and generally speaking, don't matter). On the bright side, I got to poke fun at our core values of "Having fun" that had a bunch of zany and goofy emoji faces suffixed onto it.
https://assets.ibm.com/is/image/ibm/graham-carlow-photo-ibm-...
"And here's a rendering of the building where we will process worthless humans into valuable silicon resources!"
Straight face read on client-value.pdf here.
It seems to be describing a series of high-end sales calls, in the form of a management consulting engagement, with the question of, "How can I send IBM more business, and can you help me make slide decks to pitch this idea internally?"
That's not necessarily bad. You could do a lot worse on vendors or consultants.
(And what's the saying? "Nobody ever got fired for hitching their wagon to an IBM sales team.")
You made me do it! Reading through it felt like carrying the whole world on my shoulders whilst walking up a mountain…
At the top of the mountain is an Oracle, who will ask you to explain what exactly any of that meant.
Don’t worry. They don’t know either.
> who will ask you to explain what exactly any of that meant
It means give them more money.
> Anyways… If you haven’t clicked “client value” at the top-right, I strongly encourage doing so. Ten points and a free party pack if you can read the entire thing with a straight face.
This reminds me of this video. This Is How Companies REALLY Come Up With 'Organisational Values': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1Xn0EUrQg0
Love the ending! "They don't reflect reality! If they reflected reality then the values of a company like Boeing would be Not. Quite. Enough. Bolts. But that's not their values, that's not their values. Their values are - and I swear I'm not making this up - their actual values are Safety, Quality, Integrity, Transparency. Well James In fairness, their planes are very transparent. They do deliver on transparency, that is true."
> Anyways… If you haven’t clicked “client value” at the top-right, I strongly encourage doing so. Ten points and a free party pack if you can read the entire thing with a straight face.
That's a bit cruel. I just won the party pack, but lost all desire to enjoy anything in the process.
Oh dear. Looks like I’m not taking home the party pack.
Semi-seriously I’m wondering though: when did corporate rhetoric shift from “creating value” - which almost makes rapacious capitalism sound benign - to shamelessly “capturing” that value? It’s as if they want to give the Marxists a reason to think they were right all along.
wow, you should write a book! amazing
Just a morning note (over coffee) of appreciation for the line “… when I stumble through the saloon doors…” and the whole macguffin, really.
google tells me "IBM gross profit for the twelve months ending June 30, 2025 was $36.866B"
Its not that someone writes that sort of stuff, its that it people read and think "yeah! give me some of that!" that makes me worry for humanity.
Looks like a typical corporate slide, I have seen endless of those during the last 30 years.
IBM would come off so much better if they just stuck to the one thing they still do really well. Investors can be taken on high impact tours of the physical facilities that have been purpose built around IBM's hardware if they need any convincing of the value proposition into 2030.
The AI and quantum roadmaps are an albatross for a company like this. They'll always come up in 2nd place or worse. The competition is insane. Meanwhile, there are maybe 3 other humans on earth with the means and conviction to build a competitor to their mainframe business today. It's one of the better moats in technology. It's not the biggest or most lucrative one, but no one wants to touch it because the captive audience would never risk an alternative.
Data is still IBM's best hope. It's always what they've done well. Especially the very important "core" data of complex enterprises. Things like the account balances and transactions for all customers at a bank. DB2 is easily the most compelling mainframe service and I don't ever see that changing.
> The AI and quantum roadmaps are an albatross for a company like this.
I compare those (long-term roadmaps) with automakers showing-off concept-cars, and I like what John Gruber wrote about those[1]:
> Concept designs (and worse, concept videos) are a sign of dysfunction and incompetence at a company. It’s playing make-believe while fooling yourself and your audience into thinking you’re doing something real. Concepts allow designers to ignore real-world constraints: engineering, pricing, manufacturing, legal regulations, sometimes even physics. But dealing with real-world constraints is the hard work of true design. Concepts don’t stem from a lack of confidence. They stem from a dereliction of the actual duties of design.
Similarly, this vacuous concept-of-a roadmap from IBM is clearly free from real-world constraints; constraints like AI telling people to eat rocks...
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2020/01/concept_electronics_show
Is there a connection to those odd runway fashion shows with clothes nobody would wear?
The roadmap is purely about AI, and reads like it was written by AI. It’s purely trendy and myopic.
Well they have automation on there, that's clearly distinct from AI.
It's funny because automation is the only thing you can expect from AI
IBM in the past has seemed more interested in maximizing the value of their current technologies than trying to predict and guide future technologies.
For example:
1. They missed the move to Cloud and eventually shifted focus to "hybrid" cloud, which allowed them to keep selling their existed software and hardware.
2. They missed the move to SaaS, trying instead to sell expensive on-prem enterprise software like Notes and Commerce, both of which they eventually sold to HCL.
3. Even though they were pioneers in virtualization, they were more interested in bundling their software on expensive appliances than enabling it to run in VMs.
The one thing they can predict is when something is on the verge of commoditization, at which point they decide it's too difficult to make money on and sell it off, e.g. PCs, laptops, hard drives, POS systems.
This is why IBM is dying.
Poor quality garbage being pushed to CEOs by marketing types.
TBH, there aren't many companies which have survived over 100 years like IBM.
There's survival like cockroaches and then there's survival like crocodiles.
What do you mean by this analogy?
A common meme on HN, where startup founders meet and hope to win at least 1% of IBM money, while using tools that wouldn't exist if IBM did not decide to cut down costs with Aix and sponsor Linux back in 1998.
IBM cannot die, it's the appointed big hardware provider of the most fundamental institutions of the USA. It's almost a state agency itself.
Are there also historical pages like that of IBM to see how good the predictions were?
Its a long fall down from the Nobel prize for inventing the scanning tunneling microscope.
> Build adaptable and generalist AI for effective human-machine collaboration.
That is where they ended on the AI track.
I think that's very prudent. No sense alarming prospective customers with the stages that follow on from there.
If there are questions, just say "singularity" and smile!
Can we agree that in the age of LLMs, their client value content is a good indicator of under performance, at least from their content team? I mean, this entire doc can just be prompted into existence in 30 seconds, has no substance whatsoever.
The only place where they seem to have anything novel and done a ton of research is quantum computing. But even then I have zero idea where they fit into all the competition in that space, whether or not it all just smoke and mirrors or what the enterprise use cases will be. I’ve worked there twice and this “Atlas” is very very on brand.
If you gradually give up on engineering design and manufacturing, then all that's left is catching trends and convincing investors that you will succeed in the race to the next big thing.
It's really too bad they couldn't make POWER work as a mainstream, viable alternative to x86 or Arm.
Quick, someone pull up the Pepsi logo redesign PDF
What is an IBM?
lol the hovers are hilarious.
>>
2024: Scale generative AI–infused workloads across the multi-cloud.
2025: Evolve the hybrid cloud for generative AI.
2027: Deliver an open platform for sovereign AI.
2029: Realize the convergence of bits, neurons, and qubits.
2030: Enable one seamless compute.
I like to turn these into a madlibs sort of thing to see what I can come up with:
2024: Scale bacon-infused omelet making across multi-pan
2025: Evolve hybrid cooking for generative food
2027: Deliver an open platform for sovereign food making
2029: Realize the convergence of omelets, burritos, and hash browns
2030: Enable one seamless breakfast food
Not a typewriter, cash register or PC in sight. Imagine working for a company where you can't explain to anyone what it is that your company does.
Buzzwords and terrible visualization.
Also all this "vision 2030" stuff are getting too over the top.
Buzzwords, yes.
But I like it, you can expect some of these terms more frequently in upcoming years, which can shape your investment decisions. People buy the hype, if you are early in the hype cycle you can increase your investments
I thought this would be like a history of their products from the punch card machines up through now, and I was very curious. When I saw that it's about their modern corpo slop services, I instantly clicked off. Sad!