With a company of IBM's size, there's no need to move people from Webpshere to some other project. You can shake out a few dozen engineers from anywhere without their managers even noticing.
Firing a few thousand bureaucrats would go a longer way toward improving product quality than ending product lines.
Let's be honest: An big IT product is about 25 programmers and 25 diverse people (incl marketers, designers, accountants) working for 3-10 years. With this you make a GitHub, a Word, an IE. IBM could be owning the planet today. But no, they're in the business of hotels, golf, and conferences.
If you think there's only 25 people working on Word, I think you're off by an extremely large margin.
No, I don't think Word is 25 people. But a relationship of mine made an Excel in js with 3 people and sold enough copies.
Before you say I'm wrong again, no this Excel-in-js isn't isofunctional. It's just what the customer needs.
Point being: You can make great software with few people, and IBM could do it easily.
isofunctionality is implied by saying you could make 'a Word'. I wouldn't dream of disputing that you could make a word processor that offers some limited subset of Word's functionality with a small team - but that's not making a Word-class product, it's making a simple word processor.
I currently feel negatively from the readers, so I'm testing that again: I've written a comment below with figures and sources to back my claims - See comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8956544
I've worked in large companies, now I make a living off my own company, so I must know something about software teams, complexity and feature creep. I didn't provide these estimates in the void.
Actually, that's exactly what you did.
You made a specific claim about a specific piece of software and you failed to back that up with so much as a shred of evidence.
And Atlassian does make world-class products which certainly compete with IBM. Please downvote if you prefer IBM ClearQuest to Atlassian JIRA.
I apologize for making an unbounded claim. It was unprecise because I didn't want to be specific about previous workplaces I've worked at. I have felt a shred of hatred from the HN community in the present situation, with the downvotes and negative comments.
Internet Explorer 3 had 100 people and IE5 a thousand [4], which is superior to the figure I was once told, which was 25 people for the development team. I had never been surprised by that low number because complexity grows exponentially and brings problems. I admit downvoters were right that Word didn't take 25 people to build, because of course everyone knows Microsoft has 128k employees [6].
GitHub is 255 employees[3] - Half of which for Enterprise [unbounded claim] and they weren't so many when they got famous. Git itself has had 100 developers over its history [5]; If they were employees, they wouldn't have been simultaneous employees.
So let's change my proposal: Who thinks world-class products are built by rather medium teams (<100 employees) in a few years (about 3 years)? Who has estimates for well-known products?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian
[2] https://www.atlassian.com/company/press/press-releases/atlas...
[3] https://github.com/about/team
[4] http://www.citeworld.com/article/2147006/consumerization/int...
I work on a product that's pulled in >$2bn in revenue over the last 20 years. All with an average of 25 developers working on it. It's still going strong.