January 12, 2010
— Purple Avenger (Sam Palmisano is IBM COB)
Being a former IBM'er is kinda like being a former Marine -- you remain one for life. Even though I left IBM around 15 years ago I still follow the company and maintain contact with a lot of people I knew and worked with.
Normally speeches by IBM executive types are kinda dry and not too exciting, I certainly slept through my share back in the day. But this one Palmisano gave in London is a little different - mostly because I agree with almost everything he's saying...at least on a conceptual level, although maybe not with all the specifics.
In a nutshell, what he talks about is how the world, its infrastructure, commerce mechanisms, etc will start to become "smarter" and more connected in the years to come and a lot more autonomous and adaptive. Sam largely focuses on the cheap/pervasive compute power and internet'ish connection aspects, savings to business/govt/etc.
I believe its going to go beyond that into the realm of adaptive materials we build "stuff" out of too. Adaptive in ways that don't require much if any compute power or connection to anything. Tentative "baby step" materials like the (now) commonly available TiO window films that pass visible light but largely reflect IR are one example. Its not unreasonable to expect in the future, we'll have a window film that can alter its IR reflectivity.
Adaptive industrial/commercial materials combined with the fine grained pervasive adaptive computational stuff Palmisano talks of could be a pretty powerful concept.
The whole Palmisano talk is here. Its worth a read.
Posted by: Purple Avenger at
06:18 PM
| Comments (56)
Post contains 274 words, total size 2 kb.
Posted by: ParisParamus at January 12, 2010 06:22 PM (NPtVh)
Posted by: Techie at January 12, 2010 06:22 PM (zbH+i)
I hope the brave new world isn't anything like Huxley's Brave New World
Posted by: Ben at January 12, 2010 06:29 PM (bftbi)
I hope the brave new world isn't anything like Huxley's Brave New World
I dunno, a gram is better than a damn.
Posted by: addict of some sort at January 12, 2010 06:32 PM (3wYSZ)
I always thought the PC/Laptop business should have been retained for exactly that reason, even if it was losing some money.
What prevented that from happening was the internal structure of IBM which is anything but monolithic. IBM is more a loose confederation of internal business units each of which is responsible for being a profit center. At one point, this decentralization got so out of hand that even Watson/Almaden and other pure research facilities were pressed to produce salable product to justify their existence.
Research labs were billing business units for work, business units bill other business units, etc. At no point in the managment design is it possible for someone "on high" in Armonk to say - "We understand you guys are taking one for the team, but we'll cover that for you"
Posted by: Purple Avenger at January 12, 2010 06:33 PM (HS1R+)
Posted by: Ken at January 12, 2010 06:36 PM (e+x+O)
I don't think so. The Obamunist types would love it to be that way, but these sorts of quasi-chaotic always evolving systems don't lend themselves well to central command/control. What we could wind up with is a Blade Runner'ish kind of scenario where underground hacks and bypasses thrive.
Posted by: Purple Avenger at January 12, 2010 06:38 PM (HS1R+)
Posted by: Anonymous Coward at January 12, 2010 06:41 PM (1f/aB)
Indeed. Imagine an army of "connected" Roombas going berserk, that would be hilarious. "Smart" grid connected elevator electronics deciding to shutdown a car full of people to save power, not so much...
Posted by: Purple Avenger at January 12, 2010 06:42 PM (HS1R+)
Posted by: Ben at January 12, 2010 06:42 PM (bftbi)
Heck, it wouldn't even take a bad adaptation to draw out the lawyers. A less-than-optimal solution would have them salivating over damages.
Posted by: Rob Crawford at January 12, 2010 06:45 PM (n2wxa)
Posted by: Purple Avenger at January 12, 2010 06:47 PM (HS1R+)
Posted by: Purple Avenger at January 12, 2010 06:53 PM (HS1R+)
Posted by: ParisParamus at January 12, 2010 06:58 PM (NPtVh)
Hey PA, minor quibble - the term "former Marine" is preferred over "ex-Marine". It's not a huge deal to get this one mixed up. In today's Corps, "ex-Marine" usually carries negative connotations usually centering on a somewhat less than honorable discharge.
Burn the Witch, MSgt, USMC(Ret)
Posted by: Burn the Witch at January 12, 2010 06:59 PM (U37Ux)
We live in a country where some of the passengers on US flight 1549 are considering lawsuits; by all odds they should have died in a fiery crash caused by pure chance. They survived, but they want MOAR -- they want their lawsuit lottery ticket to come in.
Posted by: Rob Crawford at January 12, 2010 07:01 PM (n2wxa)
Posted by: Matt at January 12, 2010 07:01 PM (xJvDm)
Posted by: billygoat at January 12, 2010 07:04 PM (5qJM5)
Posted by: Conner Clan at January 12, 2010 07:11 PM (HAbgs)
We're very interested to see what work Mr. Palmisano has done with the defense applications of his theory.
Posted by: Cyberdyne Systems Corporation at January 12, 2010 07:11 PM (U37Ux)
Mr. Palmisano may be right, but his strategy of offshoring everything that can be to low cost countries has resulted in over 100,000 US jobs moving to India, China, Brazil, Argentina, Vietnam. IBM has probably offshored more US jobs in the last 5 years than any other US corporation and 2010 will continue the trend.
So while he can talk about the Smart Decade before us, apparently he doesn't consider the United States and its workforce to be smart enough for Smart Technology.
If you've heard or seen the Smarter Planet ads, spots and commercials one thing that is never mentioned is personal privacy and security. Wow, we're going to put all the technology, data gathering and smart analytics into the hands of government agencies, run by unelected bureaucrats, none of which are concerned about or accountable for your personal rights, privacy and security. The most dangerous words ever said are "We're from the government and we're here to help you."
The scenario of the novel 1984 is rapidly being empowered by unrestrained, cheap technology - I question whether we as citizens will be able to keep government and others from abusing our freedoms, rights, privacy and security with these technologies.
A brave new world indeed.
Posted by: FrankReality at January 12, 2010 07:13 PM (t5/IN)
These are all 'cottage industry' type things that are intrinsically distributed-as-hell. The one key part that's tricky is a CPU - and the current price is like $10 for the operative piece in an Arduino.
Posted by: Al at January 12, 2010 07:16 PM (0lyUI)
I'd probably still be with IBM if Gerstner didn't ax the Boca site. They let me work at home a lot, and I pretty much set my own R&D agenda. My last year there was great...I was scavenging stuff from abandoned hardware lab offices/labs and built my own little H/W development bat cave in an unused office.
I don't think my manager really had any idea what the hell I was doing, but he let me do it and a piece of magic hardware appeared that I'd designed and soldered up and wrote some magic software for. Plugged it into some old ValuePoint and it worked on the second shot. Got a patent out of that "guerrilla R&D effort" and it became a significant feature of one of our products.
Good times. Not many outfits would give you that kind of latitude and blind trust.
Posted by: Purple Avenger at January 12, 2010 07:18 PM (HS1R+)
Posted by: Powdered Milk Man at January 12, 2010 07:20 PM (iJrbB)
I'm not too concerned with that. Oppressive distributed technologies are pretty easy to disable/spoof/disrupt or make so expensive to maintain that they give up on it as not cost effective.
Edward Abbey'esque "Monkey wrenching" is already a cottage industry.
Posted by: Purple Avenger at January 12, 2010 07:25 PM (HS1R+)
Actually its cloud technology that has me worried. The implications of a Fortune 500 company outsourcing its mission critical data to systems run by Google or Amazon is worrisome. One bad egg behind the firewall could bring down a hole host of companies.
Posted by: Mr. Peabody at January 12, 2010 07:31 PM (gxVc6)
Posted by: Blackford Oakes at January 12, 2010 07:32 PM (qyKoF)
I like the ThinkPad we have hooked up to our Shimadzu Spectrophotometer and DOC Analyzer. We also have an old IBM desktop hooked up and running an Flame-AA/Graphite Furnace.
Posted by: Techie at January 12, 2010 07:32 PM (zbH+i)
Posted by: Techie at January 12, 2010 07:33 PM (zbH+i)
The use of the term EX is just plain incorrect.
Modify your terminology in the future when you speak of United States Marines, past, present, or future.
When I say future, I happily point you to the course in the Marine Corps Hymn that states....
"the streets of heaven are guarded by United States Marines".
Drop and give me 50 maggot.
Posted by: leatherneck at January 12, 2010 07:41 PM (40yOy)
Posted by: Soap MacTavish at January 12, 2010 07:53 PM (554T5)
Posted by: h00v3r at January 12, 2010 07:55 PM (7O6JB)
Any F500 company that does that deserves to get whacked...HARD. In nature, the punishment for stupidity is extinction.
I've seen too many disasters with outsourced IT. If a vendor goes belly up, or dets out of the business, you're left holding a bag of shit you don't know enough about. If you had enough staff onhand to stay up to date with the status of the bag of shit, you might as well have been doing it yourself so you can set your OWN priorities. When a vendor has more than one customer (i.e. YOU), you're not going to be getting the kind of instant response you can get from in house staff.
Posted by: Purple Avenger at January 12, 2010 08:02 PM (HS1R+)
Posted by: Soap MacTavish at January 12, 2010 08:07 PM (554T5)
That's because the sales reps and CE's don't have much contact with the development labs. I was always ragging on marketing people for overstating product capabilities.
That's hardly unique to IBM though.
I'd always put little performance things in that I didn't tell the marketing people about, but that I knew customers would notice when they did their own internal benchmarking. Pretty gratifying when customers on some CIS forum would comment "what did you do to this thing, it feels 30% faster!" when they weren't expecting that.
I preferred to underpromise and overdeliver. Not everyone worked that way.
Posted by: Purple Avenger at January 12, 2010 08:15 PM (HS1R+)
Posted by: mbruce at January 12, 2010 08:17 PM (t/GDA)
IBM Boca used to outsource chunks of various software projects and I can't think of a single major outsourcing that resulted in smiling faces. Our internal staff had to "shine a lot of shit" that came from vendors to make it shippable. In several cases I can think of, the shit stubbornly resisted shining efforts and those aspects of the projects wound up getting canceled.
Unless you haunt the vendors like a evil spirit and demand buildable daily/weekly code drops, defect database access AND the right to prioritize those defect fixes AND have your own manager and small tech staff on-site at the vendor's location, you're looking for trouble.
IBM and Microsoft used to source things back and forth as part of the JDA and it was (usually) successful, but both companies had permanent staff at each other's sites working hand in hand during design/development/testing and the defect databases were shared and jointly prioritized with regular coordination meetings.
Posted by: Purple Avenger at January 12, 2010 08:28 PM (HS1R+)
Yeah, I think I waited three weeks to get you to return a call from Toronto one time.
Sorry, IBM hasn't done anything of significance in (at least) the last 15 years.
Network computers? (vapor)
Lotus Notes? (bloat)
Websphere? (it'll cost you $150k to hire a full time admin, for starters - and you need that admin to keep the damn kludge up)
Honestly, all hyperbole aside, here's an example if you think I'm full of shit:
http://tinyurl.com/ibmu2suckage
I mean, wtf is up with this thing!?
I'm sure right about now you're going to say "well, of course it's not trivial."
Do they, like, have something in the HR manual that instructs you to say shit like "well, of course it's not trivial" every time someone dares to throw a flag on the suckage?
OK, sorry if that seems harsh, I'm just unable to think of a single instance when I had what turned out to be a good experience with any IBM product or personnel. Don't just pin it on the reps - there's a whole lot of suck going on all through the organization.
Posted by: h00v3r at January 12, 2010 08:36 PM (7O6JB)
Posted by: h00v3r at January 12, 2010 08:52 PM (7O6JB)
In all my years at IBM I never received a phone call from Canada. Japan, yes. Germany? yes. UK? yes. Israel? yes. Canada? No.
You have mistaken me for someone else.
I mean, wtf is up with this thing!?
Simple fix. If you don't like it, don't buy it. If the decision wasn't yours, then do the honorable thing and resign in protest if you find the situation to be intolerable. I've walked away from many jobs over the years due to intolerable situations and stated exactly why I was resigning.
I know nothing about that product you mention. It appears to have been introduced some 13 years or so after I left IBM. Why you would think I can provide answers for it remains a mystery to me. You'll need to elaborate more on why you've chosen me as the vehicle to vent your frustrations. Frankly, it starting to sound like you're just another crank IBM hater, but I'll reserve that judgment for now and allow you an opportunity to justify your animosity and attacks towards me WHO HASN'T BEEN WITH IBM FOR ABOUT 15 YEARS.
Explain away. I'm all ears.
Posted by: Purple Avenger at January 12, 2010 08:56 PM (HS1R+)
If you called a generic product support line and got nowhere, say you want to "escalate" the issue to "level 2" tech support. Level 2 will be the guys with access to the product's defect database and the phone numbers of the development team members.
Level 2 will often be able to provide you with a temporary workaround procedure or private developmental build that hasn't gone in a public fix pack yet.
If you've been able to isolate the problem down to a specific condition or few lines of code, Level 2 is the place that needs that info. They'll forward it directly to the developers and test team so the issue can be easily reproduced and regression test cases added to the test bucket.
Just saying "this is an egregious piece of shit" won't get you too far and will get you written off as a crank.
If your organization is large enough to have an SLA with IBM, go see your IBM contract administrator and get them to activate the SLA. I've seen IBM darken the sky with developers for weeks on end flying to customer sites (specifically BofA when OS/2 file system bugs were greasing their servers every other day) when there were contractual agreements to do so even when it meant losing money.
Posted by: Purple Avenger at January 12, 2010 09:13 PM (HS1R+)
I apologize for venting in the wrong direction entirely. Seriously - sorry.
Actually, I did leave my last job because I couldn't take it in an IBM shop anymore (and was quite clear about my reasons for exiting), tell headhunters that call me because of "websphere" on my resume that I absolutely will *not* deal with it anymore and, since I got myself into a situation where I now have the authority to make the call, blew off purchase of the thingy I linked to and retired all related products.
I go into "crank" mode on the subject because I've have such a mind-blowingly bad history with IBM and I'm in the internets where I can flip out at shit in ways I'm unable to at work.
After I get some sleep I'll go through exactly what I think is BS about Palmisano's speech.
Posted by: h00v3r at January 12, 2010 09:19 PM (7O6JB)
I pretty much agree with everything he says there. Current systems are often built mimicking hierarchical organizations humans are so fond of generating. The problem with that is when commands flowing down from the top are insane ;-> The lower levels of the implementation tend to magnify rather than reduce the insanity of final results.
If a more defensive approach of asking up front "hey, is this sane to begin with?" at all levels would tend to reduce the overall level of insane behavior in a system.
Posted by: Purple Avenger at January 12, 2010 09:22 PM (HS1R+)
Posted by: h00v3r at January 12, 2010 09:24 PM (7O6JB)
Back in the OS/2 2.0 days there was period where I worked 3 months straight 100 hour weeks trying to make that thing something other than a bloated buggy piece of shit.
I also disagreed with the management decision to release it, because it was still a piece of shit at GA and needed to cook for another 6 months. I paid a career price for taking that ethical stand even though ultimately I was vindicated and all my predictions about quality/defects were proven within +/-5% of actual 9 months after GA while the people running around with "charts" were off by several orders of magnitude.
You may make some gross generalization we were all assholes, and that's OK, its your right. Some of weren't, and I know that because I've been there on the inside. I actually cared when people like you ran into problems. I talked with customers on CIS, Delphi, and newsgroups when it was still heavily frowned upon by management for development staff to interact at all with customers.
I suppose I was one of what Watson termed the "wild ducks"...one of the renegades managers try to reign in at their own risk. I was always luck enough to have managers smart enough to let me run wild.
Posted by: Purple Avenger at January 12, 2010 09:52 PM (HS1R+)
If I had to take a guess, that probably had its genesis as some expedient hack-o-matic thing the consulting arm of IBM whipped up out in the field as an internal tool that worked for the situations they employed it in and evolved as new situations developed.
It would have been a mistake to make such a thing a retail product. Probably a classic case of what amounted to a prototype being magically transformed into retail product by smoothing on some slick charts and marketing like they were Bondo.
Posted by: Purple Avenger at January 12, 2010 10:05 PM (HS1R+)
Posted by: Just A Grunt at January 13, 2010 04:32 AM (pOC9r)
Posted by: Joy to the whirled at January 13, 2010 04:44 AM (WVBjj)
Did he mention that IBM is proudly listed as a client by Covington and Burling, the firm that supplies plenty of lawyers for Gitmo terrorists?
Posted by: Marko at January 13, 2010 05:33 AM (MjNTe)
Posted by: dorkafork at January 13, 2010 06:05 AM (WbRO8)
Posted by: Purple Avenger at January 13, 2010 06:28 AM (E2GeR)
Purple Avenger
That first paragraph fit me to a tee. Left 15 years ago too. I will always value my time as an IBMer, where I cut my teeth in the industry, but those last 2-3 years there were hell. Layoffs, layoffs, layoffs...
Posted by: PugBoo at January 13, 2010 07:29 AM (sPO/s)
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Posted by: YIKES! at January 12, 2010 06:22 PM (/cfp9)