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Comment by a_subsystem | Hacker News Reader

IBM is slowly ruining everything they produce. Their systems are incredibly secure because it's extremely difficult to even run them normally as an operator, much less hack in. The byzantine/circular documentation and downloads pages on their site are woefully inadequate in enabling developers. Web searches reveal little information if you have a problem, as not many people run these systems. You generally have to pay stunning amounts to 3rd party professionals to manage your platform for even what should be relatively simple things like patching (PTFs), OS updates, and language upgrades. They will balk if you tell them they have bugs in their systems unless you can produce code yourself pinpointing the problem. They aren't interested in working with schools/universities to train young people to create fresh workers knowledgeable on their systems. Seems like they are milking the company and coasting until it expires.

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When I think of ibm, I think of how my wife had to attend special training on how to get paid at her government job due to how unreliable and chaotic the phoenix payroll system is. How it’s sometimes like a part time job sorting through it, and how they are all given time each month as needed to spend days on the phone trying to get somebody to manually fix issues that come up

> By July 2018, Phoenix has caused pay problems to close to 80 percent of the federal government's 290,000 public servants through underpayments, over-payments, and non-payments.

> Instead of saving $70 million a year as planned, the report said that the cost to taxpayers to fix Phoenix's problems could reach a total of $2.2 billion by 2023

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system

Maybe it's still going through the turning into ashes part.

I heard from a former employee at IBM that management has been offended the media used FAANG to describe big tech, because they are delusional and still think they are relevant enough to be big tech…

The slightly, but not too much, sad part is that if they had played their cards right, IBM could be a lot more relevant today than it is. Some aspects of their tech still are quite impressive and unmatched by offerings in the open systems space.

But the profit margins on their mainframe business are (last I heard anything about it) really juicy, and in today's business world, that appears to incentivize IBM management to go for the low hanging fruit of milking that while effectively cannibalizing their own market in the long run.

IBM has known how to play vendor lock-in and death by a thousand related products since before computers could fetch instructions from memory, when most of the world still thought just shipping what their customers need was where it’s at. (Evidently—if unfortunately for my worldview—that doesn’t contradict there being a lot of very good engineers there.) They may be dying a slow death, I don’t know for sure but I can imagine that, but just making their stuff worse for business reasons is not by itself a symptom of that—it’s simply part of their normal lifecycle.

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