IBM Technology Atlas

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.

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 roadmap is purely about AI, and reads like it was written by AI. It’s purely trendy and myopic.

Are there also historical pages like that of IBM to see how good the predictions were?

This is why IBM is dying.

Poor quality garbage being pushed to CEOs by marketing types.

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.

Quick, someone pull up the Pepsi logo redesign PDF

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.