Their deployment process for a business critical java application is as follows:

- Someone calls IBM to alert the person (resource) responsible that they want to do a new deployment. If this person is sick or on vacation, try again later.

- Then they send over a jar file with the compiled application.

- The responsible person copies the jar file to the appropriate location and restarts the server.

I rest my case.

After a major, unexpected power outage we had to stand around waiting for a technician to be dispatched and drive over to:

1.) Flip the power switch.

2.) Say 'Looks good.'

3.) Leave.

(I was told in dead serious terms that I'd be dismissed for powering up the box myself.)

I was in need to log into a Mac Pro that ended up in one of the Server Rooms that IBM took over in our building.

I basically needed to connect a keyboard, log in and enable remote desktop so I could run a few XCode builds (I don't have a Mac, and I needed to test a few hybrid Sencha/Phonegap apps)

after several phone calls involving my boss and his boss, three meetings with five IBMers and 3 months (I kid you not) we gave up, and ended up borrowing a few personal MacBooks from friends to test the apps.

The Server Room was a few meters from the conference room, it was a 2 minute job, but we could not enter and do the changes ourselves without IBMs permission.

The word frustration doesn't even cover it.

(oh, and the 'copy jar files' thing? totally true.)

Sorry, But there are reasons why your dev team is kept out of the server rooms. Because generally when permission is given they go in and make big mess, which some one has to clean up later. Plus there are thousands of other issues like data security, theft etc that need to be taken care of here.

I've worked for a outsourcing firm here in India, we partnered with another outsourcing firm. While we were there our partner offered a lower hourly billing price and we lost most projects to them. We had a strict server room policy. They came in with all these policies of 'process elimination','cutting bureaucracy' - Which ultimately directly translated to cow boy behavior with total collapse in discipline.

After some time the chaos ensued. Dev's would just walk into servers rooms for even simple things collecting logs, or troubleshooting production software issues. Until some one accidentally pulled out a power cable while toying with a server. A downtime happened, followed by all kind of data consistency problems. It took quite a while, and a lot of beating from senior management for them to realize rules exist for a reason.

My respect for IBM just increased after I read your story. If I have to ever in the future outsource some IT infrastructure I may chose them.

What is disappointing to read in the IBM case is yet another example of slashing lots of jobs in the US and shipping them overseas. And yes, a lot is lost in the process - it's not a magic one-for-one replacement. The older I get, the more the platitudes used to justify this ring hollow. So much action is driven to satisfy the relative greed of stockholders, and arguably not "necessary." America has forgotten that the health of the stock market != the health of the citizenry.

Technology services jobs should be among the highest value work we can do onshore. We can't all be bankers and lawyers, nor would it be desirable even if possible.

I agree.

I don't fault IBM for the above anecdote - it's what the customer agreed to and in a way it was surely in the customer's best in best interest. The organization in question had long since stopped rewarding or investing in any sort of homegrown excellence.

Sadly, it's the same cycle all the way through - neglecting internal investment until you have no choice but to continue paying your minders on their terms.

Or, better, there are still a lot of, ahem, uninformed people that will overpay for their crappy service/software.

Anything that I've seen from IBM have been enough to convince me to never, ever spend one cent in anything from that company with one exception: Power servers

Those are executives over 55 who haven't kept up with technology.

The reaction among founders under 40 would be exactly the opposite: Contracting anything out to IBM would mark you as technically incompetent and a reckless spendthrift.

But it is easier to switch to Heroku for the IBM customer than to become Heroku for IBM. I wouldn't bet on IBM.

Bluemix is too little too late, and appears to be an advertisement for all the open-source 'cool' tech that IBM did not invent.

Let's not even get into the fraud that was the share-buyback (second only to Apple I believe). Now that's ended the tricky question of where that elusive revenue will come from looms its ugly head.

I'm pretty fucking scared about what a company in decline with an arsenal of patents like IBM's is going to do to hit its EPS targets in the next few years.

Cringely's more recent work has been kind of hit or miss, though.

It actually has some good start-up lessons in there!

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/1998/pulpit_19980724_0005...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_X._Cringely

Yes, that is flawed logic. But it's what people tend to want. So if you're trying to make a quick buck that's what you latch on.

If, on the other hand, you're following your intrinsic curiotsity you want to study fallen giants to see what can be learned from past mistakes. Now, none of that is sexy. "Fallen," "past" and "mistakes" are not words you tend to see on business book jackets. But some writers will do such a book anyway.

I'm not saying Cringely is automatically to be trusted here, but it's not accurate to say books like this are often written to make a quick buck. If you want a quick buck you write something glowing and positive and no one will complain.

[1] http://www.endicottalliance.org/jobcutsreports.php

I've read him since back in his InfoWorld days. For the most part I'd say "non-sensationalist", unlike say, Dvorak. I'd don't know that I'd classify him as a reporter, but more like a pundit. I mean, I don't look to Cringely for hard facts but more his take on the facts that we collectively know.

Anyway, were it the type of thing I care to read about I'd buy his book.

EDIT: "Crinkly"? Seriously, Android auto-correct? (Though to be fair, Mac OS X tried the same thing when I fixed it.)

Having read his many articles about IBM, he's very nostalgic about a "great" company that's failing. I think the book is passion project for him because he likes IBM (or liked the old IBM).

[1] I mean this Cringely, the famous Cringely, in case you're not aware that this is a pen name and that there have been a string of mediocre writers using the same pen name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_X._Cringely

It's kind of hard to say. I've been following his stuff since sometime in the 90's, and he's definitely brash and opinionated (at times anyway), but I don't know if I'd exactly say he's "sensationalistic". I'd probably take his work with a small grain of salt, but I don't see him as somebody who just "makes shit up" out of the air.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070504_0020...

He's been writing about tech since 1987, initially with InfoWorld.

Said IBM was going to lay off 150k by the end of the year like 5 yeArs ago

Now he writes a captain obvious book that could apply to anyone in the industry.

My only issue is a personal one (that I more like to pick and choose my own stack) so there are free technologies more amenable to that. But as far as creating a suite of business applications is concerned -- biggest problem I see is developers not knowing how to control WebSphere (auto-deploy, auto re-admin) which seems to be cultural rather than an issue with the software.

And FYI to all those complaining about the "send a jar to IBM?!!" scenario you should realize that sending around WARs/EARs is pretty commonplace in the java world. it's kindof like zipping a certain git commit, for all you dynamic folks. I agree it would be nice to have something simpler but corps are not in the habit of sharing their repos with each other and creating WARs/EARs/JARs is trivial. Every project has a build script for this already in daily use.... But our stuff is onsite luckily, i have no experience with outsourcing infrastructure to them.

It seems like markets and investors have been accustomed to the huge, meteoric rises of a small handful of star companies, forgetting perhaps that plenty of businesses don't need to become household names overnight to succeed.

One could write a similar article for Microsoft, really. I think they screwed the pooch with Windows 8 and Surface. They tried to protect both the Windows and Office monopolies simultaneously in the face of radical change, and lost both.

IBM has been the biggest player in enterprise IT since it was done with typewriters and adding machines. For them to become irrelevant, even if it takes a decade, is a huge deal.

You have to call the right decade, though. :) The startup community started declaring Microsoft on its death bed in the late 1990s...

(You might be conflating the startup community with the open source community of the late nineties, members of which did say that Linux was to "soon" overtake Windows in the desktop).

Considering the large overlap between those two communities, I'm not sure it's an unwarranted conflation. The first tech boom included a bunch of Linux-oriented startups and IPOs, whose successful pitch to VCs involved essentially, "Microsoft is on its way out".

The majority in the late nineties were web startups -- for this new fangled "web" thing. Think amazon, pets.com, etc.

By all measures, IBM != dead (for any predictable future period).

Ask WordPerfect.

Could we not have said the same thing about RIM in 2009?

By this argument, we can safely say "X is dead, since RIM dies in < 5 years.". Substitute X with any company you can think of. This is obviously wrong, so your argument does not stand.

read that sentence again and think about the US.

Moving on to the Empire, you don't see soldiers assassinating the president (or members of Congress) because they want higher pay.

I know that it feels similar, but we really aren't there... at least not yet.

Perhaps because that's not how politics is played in the 21st century in a Western country.

That doesn't necessarily mean the decline is not there -- it could be just as big as Rome's but different. For one it wont have much to do with "babaric hordes".

When you see local gangs taking control of areas of the country (in some cases printing their own money) we've arrived.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal#Timeline_of_downf... ($90/share to bankrupt in about a year)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_Stearns#Fed_bailout_and_sa... ($140/share to $2 in less than a year)

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/723527/00009317630300... ($90/share to bankrupt in 2 years)

These are just egregious cases. The stock market as an oracle is thoroughly overrated. BlackBerry, the late 90s market bubble, the mid-00s financial products bubble... stock price movement says less than you think it does.

So part of this policy is an explicit pledge of the company. How it's being achieved, or attempted, is of course another story, as well as, say, whether everyone should dump their IBM stock once it reaches that goal, assuming enough greater fools can be found....

     ...often diverges wildly from fact

And you don't get margin calls if you're not buying on margin.

Depending on your solvency and leverage, that's either close by or eons away away but it is real.

Comparing the yield of this dead horse to a company that actually matters like Caterpillar or XOM its about the same, around 2.5%.

Of course .gov guarantees return of my capital from my credit union, but who knows what'll happen in the market WRT IBM, so it should return a bit more. CAT and XOM are actually worth something as a going concern. IBM, well...

So.. rate of return below real world inflation rate, no prospects for growth, no one in the market expects future growth (not paying a high price now for earnings later). Doomed. Maybe google or apple will buy them for pennies on the dollar? IBM has patents...

Bloomberg Businessweek had a feature article two weeks ago and one thing it highlighted was that the use of "non-gaap" in IBM's earning release increased 10 fold or something

Now they're pretty nearly dead - and I don't think there's any doubt that it was iPhone and Android that killed them. Sales and stock prices often lag behind a real inflection point.

One of the most important lessons I learned in big corporate America was that in the end the cutters always lose, even if they can make small gains in the short term there is only so much you can cut. Upside is potentially larger, but finding it is the core of the problem.

It was, when, 1890, that the US Census took more than 10 years to process one census that is supposed to happen each 10 years? So, US Census needed a better tool. Enter H. Hollerith who borrowed the idea of punched cards from, maybe, the Jacquard loom.

Tom Watson was with National Cash Register or some such, saw the Hollerith equipment, concluded that it was the secret to automating routine business record keeping, especially accounting, and IBM was born.

Watson sold the heck out of his equipment. And he had a team of good electro-mechanical engineers in Poughkeepsie designing and building the equipment. That takes us to about 1960. They made a lot of money.

About then, Tom Watson, Jr. visited Columbia University and reported that there was a guy there doing things, whatever, 200,000 times a second.

An IBM life insurance customer in NYC complained that the IBM punched cards were taking up too much room. So, some changes were needed, e.g., magnetic tape.

Due to US WWII work on vacuum tube digital computers and pushed by Univac, IBM got into the computer business, with magnetic tape, software, etc.

In the late 1950s Watson was told that he had no research division and that to have a good one he needed a leader good researchers would respect. So, Watson got a chunk a land in Westchester County, NY and hired Eero Saarinen to build him a fancy research lab on a hill near Yorktown Heights.

By the mid 1960s, IBM had an idea, a line of compatible computers called System 360 (the origin of the IBM 'mainframe' computers). So, a customer could start with a cheap, small, slow System 360/20, 30, 40, etc. and when ran out of capacity upgrade to a 360/50, 65, 85, 91, 95, etc. and just keep running the same software.

IBM regarded itself not as an electronics company or a computer company but a marketing company. The marketing/sales people had nearly all the power.

Here the focus was still on routine business record keeping, 'business machines', and not general purpose computing. IBM had some good work in general purpose computing, but the executives stayed with their 'good IBM customers'. So, when MIT did Multics in 1969, IBM was slow to respond. When DEC was selling good general purpose time sharing on the DEC 10, IBM was slow to respond.

As a means of a time-sharing computer to be used for developing operating systems, IBM Cambridge Scientific Center did CP67/CMS for the IBM 360/67 virtual memory computer of about 1967 and where CP67 was virtual machine. Lots of people loved CP67/CMS, later VM/CMS, but IBM's marketing people didn't want to sell it. Internally, VM/CMS ran the company through at least 1994. Also there was VNET, roughly like the Internet except the computers were also the routers -- did essentially of the IBM internal computing through at least 1994. Use it? Yes. Eagerly sell it? No. 'Dog fooding'? No.

In the 1970s, IBM did move to System 370, a 'mainframe' which had virtual memory. Customers wanted to do interactive, on-line applications, and IBM responded slowly. For the communications, IBM did Systems Network Architecture, which was about as flexible and easy to install as a railroad and about as costly. IBM did notice that with much in on-line activity, they could sell a lot more System 370 computers and did.

IBM was slow to let the capacity of the 370 computers increase as quickly as customers wanted, but by 1980 IBM had a collection of faster boxes. As 18 wheel trucks lined up to receive these computers, the line backed up to the NYS Thruway, and there was a blip in the US GDP.

A lot of IBM customers were doing 'personal productivity', e.g., word processing and electronic spreadsheets, on IBM's mainframe computers.

But that was 1980, and DEC, Data General, Prime and others were doing well. Prime was a single board, bit-sliced, virtual memory computer with some extra register sets for fast process switching and a darned efficient time sharing box, much more efficient, and much easier to use, than anything from IBM. And in 1980, Prime gave the best ROI on the NYSE.

Also about here came the microprocessors, e.g., Intel 8080 and 8086. Then PCs began to explode. Then work started moving off IBM's mainframes. By 1986 or so, DEC was getting more revenue from DuPont than IBM was.

There were well done IBM internal reports on technology and markets that outlined the future and the threats to IBM's business, but IBM's leadership, really successful mainframe salesmen, essentially ignored the reports. The mainframe people had the power and worked to kill off anything else inside IBM.

At one time, IBM CEO Gerstner said that "IBM is the most arrogant, inwardly directed, process oriented company I've every seen.".

By 1986, at an internal top management meeting, it was possible to go around the table and find that nearly no one had made their projections. The conclusion was that God had ceased to smile on IBM.

IBM laughed at Intel and Microsoft, and those two came to have by far the last laugh.

For a while IBM's Cocke's work on reduced instruction set computing (RISC) gave IBM an opportunity to grab the high end desktop and workstation markets, e.g., for finance, engineering design, graphics, but the mainframe people didn't like the competition. E.g., when an IBM mainframe had a processor clock of about 10 MHz, Cocke's discrete component board with RISC had a clock of 80 MHz.

Near 1994, IBM in three years IBM lost $16 billion and went from ~400,000 employees down to ~200,000. The research division phone book went from 4500 names down to 1500 with about 500 of those recent temporary employees.

Then IBM pushed services, e.g., they would run your data center for you.

IBM bought companies with attractive products and put the IBM marketing force behind those products.

Net, the first and last 'visionary' thing IBM did was to grab Hollerith's work, although, of course, it was Hollerith who was the real visionary. Since then IBM has focused on selling 'business machines' for routine business record keeping for large banks, insurance companies, manufacturing companies, and governments. That's their 'market'. They haven't tried very hard to look for other markets. In technology, IBM lets others take the first steps and maybe does something similar or maybe just buys a company. That's what they are still doing.

IBM had a lot of opportunities they just dropped, apparently deliberately:

They could easily have had all of Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle. At one time, they ran NSFNet, that is, the Internet; had IBM stayed with that work, they could have be running some huge fraction of all of the Internet. IBM was long a leader in laser printing, e.g., for printing bank statements on a roll of paper moved with a fork lift truck, but in the US HP made big bucks in that market. In the 1980s IBM saw the need for video servers and had some working; same for wearable computing. For the Internet of things, IBM has long had the TCP/IP stack on a chip. For relational database, IBM invented it, roughly parallel to E. Wong's work at Berkeley, but now the revenue for relational database goes to, right, Oracle, etc. IBM did early work on the tricky 'passive' amplifier wrap around an optical fiber to amplify the digital signal without converting from optical to electrical; likely that amplifier is crucial for the backbone of the Internet, but IBM is not running that backbone; maybe IBM is getting some patent license revenue. IBM did good, early work on giant magneto resistive disk heads and associated vertical recording and long was the leader in magnetic disk, but now people buy hard disk drives from Seagate, Western Digital, Maxtor, etc. IBM did a lot of high end work on large disk storage systems, but people buy from EMC, build their own, etc. It goes on and on: At one time or another, IBM had in their lap the beginnings of nearly everything we see today in information technology but dropped it.

IBM remains focused on being a 'marketing' company, but now they are a bit short on what to market.

Ah, yet another mainframe salesman bites the dust.

Jumping on computers was "visionary" in the same way as Hollerith's work, but perhaps more so, with various complications like an antitrust suit to help jump start it. But they did a lot of interesting things in that period, seriously pursued scientific computing for a while (was one of the biggest markets for some time), made relatively affordable machines like the 650 (main memory a drum, first mass produced computer per Wikipedia) and 1130 (360 technology with some very clever hacks), certainly innovated in computer languages (FORTRAN, maybe PL/1). Taught us a lot about how not to write software (The Mythical Man Month), but were hardly unique in that, or the second system syndrome.

In a pattern I observed at the time, companies that really screwed up their disk drives, as in too many failures in the field, lost so much brand equity they were forced to sell the remnants to another company. Or at least this is how I interpret IBM's sale of their drive unit to Hitachi in 2002, and Maxtor's to Seagate in 2006.

Anyway, the point being that for disk drives IBM did worse than the pattern you describe above, this was an severe execution failure.

Although that also seems to be happening in services.

You make good points. I typed ASAP. There are a lot of possible "quibbles" with what I wrote.

You are correct about the 'vision' thing -- Tom, Jr. did a very gutsy thing pushing out System 360. He essentially bet the company. By then IBM was well into computing, e.g., the 7094 based on transistors instead of tubes, but 360 was at least two giant steps more.

But I do remember that somehow about then DEC was able to do the PDP 10, nice system -- hmm. Dartmouth was able to do the system that GE used to sell time-sharing, etc. MIT did Multics. Net, others were able to write OS software without betting a Fortune 10 or so company on the work.

You are fully correct about the anti-trust suit -- in a sense it made IBM 'gun shy' and timid for a long time.

As I recall, long IBM sold the main chips used by Cisco and Juniper. I can guess that IBM gets patent licensing revenue for disk head technology, and maybe the heads themselves. But the big bucks are in selling the drives and the subsystems.

I forgot about the sale of Maxtor to Seagate.

I guess my broad point was that IBM was essentially always a 'marketing company' run by successful mainframe salesmen. E.g., once, the day after my wedding, I got an offer from the IBM Chicago branch office, and the head there gave me that description of IBM. They wanted me to hold the hands of the oil refining customers using linear programming to make decisions on what inputs to take and what outputs to make -- big bucks in that, still. They had sold a 360/85 and likely wanted to have sold more. Gee, I might have gotten to work with Ralph Gomory, later head of IBM Research.

I guess part of my 'broad point' was that they kept throwing off their plates little opportunities like Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Seagate, EMC, operating the whole Internet (can you believe that!), Yahoo (IBM had Prodigy, good idea, bad execution), OS/2 (ahead of anything from Microsoft until Windows NT or 2000), Netscape (IBM had a decent Web browser early on), Web servers ("ah, what's to do with an Web server; trivial, right?" -- build one easy to program and to serve 10,000 pages a second and then tell me that).

PL/I? Yup! It was done by a committee headed by George Radin in about 1964. I used PL/I and CP67/CMS to do the first computer based scheduling of the fleet at FedEx. Nicely enough I was paid well to learn PL/I by the US DoD at the JHU/APL for some work on passive sonar and the FFT. Once I tried to talk to Radin about operating systems, and he said, "Three times in my career I tried to help IBM in operating systems, and three times I broke my pick trying.".

I remember the sale to Hitachi but didn't know that the IBM drives sucked. I've heard only good things about Hitachi drives; sorry I didn't mention them -- another quibble.

IBM had object oriented programming in microcode as part of 'Future Systems' in 1980 or was it 1970?

But, they were a 'marketing company' selling to 'good IBM customers'.

> Although that also seems to be happening in services.

I can believe that. Long IBM had their pick of the job pool something like Google seems to today; likely no more.

So be it.

And it was a fairly ugly, long, and drawn out second system syndrome experience; rather famously Bell Labs dropped out of the project but the experience inspired UNIX(TM), which is Multics with some vital parts missing. Delivered much later than planned, but it was a quality system. It very possibly was the only system of the ones you mentioned that had scope on the order of OS/360 and TSS/360 (5 and 1 man millennia) ... but it wasn't done with the commercial pressure on those IBM OSes, and of course embraced virtual memory vs. disdained it.

Multics and the PDP-10 were both crippled by 1 MiB address space sizes (1/2 of 36 bits, word addressed, the total for the PDP-6/10/Decsystem-20, per segment for Multics, which was much less limiting, mostly a nightmare for big data sets).

I'd quibble OS/2 was also a failure of execution, driven by marketing. IBM told IT managers that the PC/AT was the last PC model they'd have to buy for a long time, but the 286's protected mode was horribly misconceived (changing a 64 KiB segment incurred a terrible performance hit). Therefore early OS/2 had to run well on it ... but really couldn't all that well. Whereas Windows 3.0 hit a lot of niches very well, and the rest is history.

Somehow I don't see Cisco, very much not part of their DNA ... but then again, that's your whole point.

Future Systems would have been circa 1970, it was the ambitious 360 follow-on (vs. System/370 which was 360s with ICs and DRAM). As I understand it, that group eventually gifted us with the very advanced AS/400 et. al. Like Multics, every file is part of the address space, it's very neat and worth studying.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the insights and stories you've shared. I got my start with the IBM/1130, but then it was UNIX(TM), watched but didn't really partake of the by then doomed Multics (Honeywell was horribly managed, blamed a project failure on the decision to microcode the machine and then tried to compete with 1 MPS async processors through the '80s), PDP-10s and Lisp Machines, followed by an unending sequence of UNIX(TM) and Unix alikes. Bleah, when you know we can do much better.

But it didn't have to be that way. IBM certainly had a chance to win my heart and mind with their systems in my home town's college (the 1130 and a 370/115), before I got exposed to better systems when I left.

So, those guys did Prime. The OS was written in a slightly tweaked Fortran. I ran two of them and did my dissertation computing on one of them. For the first one, we were doing some DoD analytical work on TSO, and our two programmers were spending $80 K a year. We got a Prime for $120 K, and our computer usage went through the roof. We just copied over our 500 K TSO Fortran programs, compiled, and ran -- ran fine. That Prime was just for our group of 40, but soon the company of 300 wanted one, and I served on the selection committee. For the second one, I got that for a B-school as a prof. There the Prime made the central computer group's Amdahl 470/V6 look silly, and I served on the committee to select a new university CIO.

At one time I had a summer job, and at first I was to program an 1130, but later the job was for me to design and build some DC power supplies to power some IBM tape drives IBM had given away to a research lab.

Prior to forming Software Arts, he had been a market researcher for Prime Computer Inc., a senior systems programmer for FasFax Corporation, and a senior software engineer for Digital Equipment Corporation. At Digital, he was project leader of the WPS-8 word processing software, where he helped to specify and develop one of the first standalone word processing systems.

And the more technical partner Bob Frankston was an MIT type. I remember one Software Arts employee, friend of one or more, or maybe Bob's youngest brother, who was a friend of mine, mention that among other things they appreciated what the system adopted from Multics.

Being bit-sliced, the Prime micro-architecture you mention was microcoded, which of course would fit with their following the example of the successful System 360, many models of which had to be microcoded because the logic family they used pretty much had only one speed, they made micro-architectures narrower, down to 8 bits as I recall, for the slower machines, and the 2? fastest had none.

Honeywell's rejection of microcoding helped made Multics and GECOS systems terribly uncompetitive, at least by the time Visicalc was being developed, although the macro-architecture allowed you to easily hook up 6 CPUs in one system (and 8 with a horrible kludge, as I recall).

> I wrote story after story, [... but] I was naive. My hope was that when it became clear to the public what was happening at [...] that things would change.

Bet you were called a stalker and cyberbully.

Source: former IBMer.

I have a friend who sends me quotes from their work sometimes, like “Good clarity on Data, Cloud, Engagement! Loved your passion about IBM’s competitiveness with Cloud!” or “My key takeaway is to evaluate how I can use information to stay engaged in analyzing data!”.

Whatever are they so happy about, I wonder. Cocaine stipend?

As a sysadmin, I can't think of anything more exciting then the Power and Z stuff but keeping that hardware around is not realistic anymore for a lot of companies. IBM kind of screws up with prices, contracts, service level, etc.

Disclaimer: I have been on both sides of the fence.