Comment by scrubs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrubs | Hacker News Reader

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Is it? Really? No. In fact it's not. Name one Indian company that ever reached 1/10th of what ibm had so that it's a candidate for seeing it on the way down.

A serious insult because it'd be much more true would be to look at it's OD, culture and demise since Gerstner. Gerstner wasn't happy with a lot of IBM slop, paper pushers, and corporate BS either. That'd keep it on track rather than spurious comparisons.

Gerstner layed of somewhere around 20% of work force, sold off tons of ibm art, real estate etc because IBM was lost ... And losing money. That says something. Spurious comparisons don't.

Labeling IBM bad because it out sources to India is a vieled insult to indians and it's culture I guess. If that's the position -- not mine --- have the galiteantry and courage to just say so.

I'm reminded of the Futurama line: do you idiots where you're from? Nobody nowhere can say no to that. American culture, OD, and common sense when it's not losing money, playing golf, splashing around shareholder cash on art or tieing up innovation in BS (all of which IBM did pre Gerstner and was called out for) expects problems fixed, brings out the best in all comers, and expects comers to be value add. Thosr that cant play that game are out.

Regrettably this has one dark corner. Management isnt so good at overseeing itself. So in really bad situations they are good at shifting blame. Well nobody said it'd be easy. Let's start by not gossiping however.

> Name one Indian company that ever reached 1/10th of what ibm had so that it's a candidate for seeing it on the way down.

I'm not sure what your point is here, but based on Forbes 2000 for 2020 via Wikipedia [1], by market cap Tata Consultancy Services and Reliance are both larger than IBM. Both have grown faster than IBM since 2020. In terms of companies overall a number of other Indian companies are larger than IBM.

If you look at infotech alone, Tata Consultancy Services is the one bigger than IBM, and Infosys (>50% of IBM market cap), HCL Technologies and Wipro are all larger than 1/10th of IBM.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_I...

2020? Big deal. IBM has been around for serious time. Like I said show me an Indian company that was a tech giant for analysis on the way down. No doubt IBM has got work to do. But tata ain't no ibm. Furthermore my take stands up for Indian know how not crapping on it as others have done here. It's just that indian companies nowhere near have ibm corporate legacy. As for ibm: it wouldn't kill you to try to innovate again not react and buy innovation even if Watson was a bust

> IBM has been around for serious time.

Tata is nearly half a century older than IBM. IBM is older than the TCS subsidiary, sure - TCS is "only" 54 years old. But I have no idea why that matters to your argument as it's still not clear to me why you were making the comparison.

That said, IBM does today have more employees in India than in the US, and IBMs current CEO is Indian-American, born in India and educated in part at an IIT so I can see why some would describe it that way. To me at least there's no value judgement - positive or negative - attached to that. It seems like you took offence at the comparison of IBM to an Indian company, and I can see why you'd think so in context, but I don't see why that justifies downplaying the success of companies like TCS.

> Like I said show me an Indian company that was a tech giant for analysis on the way down.

I still have no idea what you intend this to mean. TCS is a tech giant. It's the largest IT service company in the world.

As for Tata being no IBM, you're right, Tata Group is older and several times the size of IBM. The Tata Consultancy Services subsidiary alone is larger than IBM, and Tata as a whole employs about twice as many people as IBM, most in TCS. IBMs original business was thematically closer to what they still do today, I guess, but only marginally.

>> Like I said show me an Indian company that was a tech giant for analysis on the way down.

>I still have no idea what you intend this to mean. TCS is a tech giant. It's the largest IT service company in the world.

What is so tough here understand here? I've done IT for 30 years. I don't think I've used a gadget, O/S, compiler, cloud resource, dev-ops, or distributed algo from Tata once. IBM? All day long. I consulted at AT&T ... man the number of things they made I used was insane.

Moreover, given time all large companies cycle between running on all 8 cylinders to periods where marketing, paper pushers, corporate culture BS, losing contact with customers and customer satisfaction, poor quality erode the top/bottom line, lead to a loss of market power, pricing power, and so on.

Tata, assuming it ever had the towering heights IBM hit on all fronts, may be big now. But wait around long enough and Tata like most large human organizations will fall from grace too. And I bet, at it's core, outsourcing will not be found to be root-cause; related perhaps but certainly blaming the outsiders isn't wisdom. So as I said, then re-said, and say again show me one of those Indian companies *who are on a down cycle now*. The way I have contextualized it here makes for a relevant comparison.

While I'm at it: I'll say again unlike posters earlier up, I refuse to crap on IBM because it out-sources to Indian companies. Like anywhere some Indian companies suck. Some don't. Some may be on a high cycle like Tata. Those in the US doing the outsourcing maybe already sucked before outsourcing began. It's those kinds of spurious insults which are not appropriate and not my position.

This assumes that IBM's core business is the same as their Services business. I doubt they have any overlap. They got onto the bandwagon after seeing how successful some of the early Indian services companies were (in terms of revenue) such as Infosys, Wipro, and TCS.

I would put the IT services business of Accenture, Cap Gemini, and IBM in the same bucket as the rest of the Indian firms.

IBM itself has large divisions in Southeast Asia that function basically the same as Indian IT firms.

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