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ibmfud

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ibmfud
·4 года назад·discuss
Did you forget one coalition partner?
ibmfud
·4 года назад·discuss
Don't care, just give me both. Since I've never been to London Ohio I don't think it will be a problem.
ibmfud
·4 года назад·discuss
Thanks, you just got me all the docs from Samantha the Plumber and Amit the Plumber too!
ibmfud
·4 года назад·discuss
I keep passports, degree certificates, deeds, health insurance docs.. the things I would grab if I was running out the door, in a single box file.

Everything else is basically unsorted, maybe vaguely sorted by date of putting on top of the pile, by placing things together after searching for them once, or by 'I think I know where I saw it'.

I have tried putting everything in themed folders, it's a waste of time. The time spent searching for something is much less than the time spent organizing everything in advance. The modal piece of paper will be thrown away after a few years without ever having been needed.
ibmfud
·4 года назад·discuss
Please can I have all the Plumber correspondence from Joe the Plumber, regardless of year or document type?
ibmfud
·4 года назад·discuss
IBM identified back in the 70s their core asset and were very explicit about what it was. "No one gets fired for buying IBM." Their key strategy since then has been to monetize this asset in a variety of creative, and mainly very effective ways.

Thinkpads were a great example of this. Laptops which promised decent quality and support for a high price. When the laptop market was demystified and commodified, IBM correctly got out of it - for a decent price.

If some random start-up, or even Google, had built Watson, it would have correctly been seen as a gimmick. Instead it sold literally billions of software consulting to people who thought they needed AI but actually just needed a search box with dynamic autosuggestion. Would you rather get some junior guy to hack something together using open source tools, or would you rather pay IBM 50 times as much? If you chose the former, you're simply not in the target market.

The hybrid cloud is exactly the same game - as is made quite clear in that ad, it's pitched at middle management who don't want to look like chumps for ignoring the cloud, but don't want to fuck up by moving to it.

Reputation is a difficult asset to monetize - effectively you make money from it by degrading and then destroying it. After all, if you carry living up to your good reputation, you're not extracting any advantage from it. IBM can't sell their reputation or their name to the highest bidder. All they can do is keep trawling for business lines where it gives them a comparative advantage.

It's easy to see this as unscrupulous - but their customers genuinely do get a benefit from the confidence they have in IBM.