Life takes you in curious circles sometimes. I am writing
this from Armonk, New York - home of IBM. Just dropped my son off with a bunch of
college bound baseball players who are on their way to Europe to play for a
couple of weeks.
This is not how I expected to make my first trip to Armonk. Twenty-Eight years ago, I started my first job out of college at IBM and every manager
dreamed of working in Armonk or at least White Plains - the headquarters
and mecca of the most admired company in the world. Don’t laugh, you can look it up! IBM was
Fortune’s most admired company in the mid 80’s.
So, I visited the corporate headquarters. You can’t get
close because there is a big security gate, but here is a picture of the little
sign.
It’s a beautiful place, Armonk – picturesque lake, beautiful
trees, scenic views, deer roaming over the property. I am not kidding!! I drove
up to the entrance and three deer walked across the road. Here is the photo evidence taken with my awesome Samsung Galaxy Note II.
While nature is alive
and well in Armonk, innovation does not appear to be so. I know IBM is a
great company with over $200B in market cap, but when is that the last time IBM
did something in tech that mattered? When
I worked for them in the 80’s, we still made the best hardware and integrated
software and while Gerstner saved the company and steered them towards
services, its hard to think of them as a powerful tech company anymore.
I can forgive IBM for missing the internet, mobile and
tablets. These were consumer based driven revolutions and IBM has never had a
feel for the consumer side of the business. After all the “B” in IBM is for
Business and they correctly jettisoned the PC business long ago.
What I can’t forgive IBM for is “missing the cloud”. The
cloud is nothing but a bunch of massive data centers connected by really fast telecommunications.
This is a business that IBM knows very well. Big datacenters, raised floors,
thick cable, cooling, energy efficiency…these are things that IBM knows. It
knows about tightly coupled processors and virtual machines ( don’t forget
VM/370 long before VMWare). It knows about reliability, availability ,
scalability and security. And yet it has let Google, Amazon, Salesforce and others own the cloud. Even Microsoft
whose DNA is on-premise smaller systems has lept ahead of IBM with Azure and
Offcie365.
To me, this is an unpardonable sin. It not easy to predict
the future and sometimes you get sideswiped by trends or business models that
you don’t understand. But for IBM to miss the cloud, someone was really
sleeping. Apple got its second chance and they didn't miss, the cloud was IBM's second chance and they appear to have slept through it.
And after visiting the little town of Armonk with its lake
and wildlife and deer, I guess I now know why.
