They each get in their car, fasten their seatbelt, and back out of their storage bay onto the road. They tune their radio to a morning zoo being visited by a reeling ninth caller who didn’t win the free party pack.
They depart the trunk line and park in a fragmented matrix of similarly unique cars, de-safety their belt, rummage the console for an identity token, and head into their own morning zoo, paned wall-to-wall with one-way glass, seemingly installed backwards.
The humans shed the remaining vestiges of their real human mornings and dutifully touch base on how to liven up their portable document that contentfully explores, ”how can technology further deliver value to our audience?” perhaps using hypertext, while drinking more coffee.
Anyways… If you haven’t clicked “client value” at the top-right, I strongly encourage doing so. Ten points and a free party pack if you can read the entire thing with a straight face.
Don’t worry. They don’t know either.
It means give them more money.
Semi-seriously I’m wondering though: when did corporate rhetoric shift from “creating value” - which almost makes rapacious capitalism sound benign - to shamelessly “capturing” that value? It’s as if they want to give the Marxists a reason to think they were right all along.
Poor quality garbage being pushed to CEOs by marketing types.
The AI and quantum roadmaps are an albatross for a company like this. They'll always come up in 2nd place or worse. The competition is insane. Meanwhile, there are maybe 3 other humans on earth with the means and conviction to build a competitor to their mainframe business today. It's one of the better moats in technology. It's not the biggest or most lucrative one, but no one wants to touch it because the captive audience would never risk an alternative.
Data is still IBM's best hope. It's always what they've done well. Especially the very important "core" data of complex enterprises. Things like the account balances and transactions for all customers at a bank. DB2 is easily the most compelling mainframe service and I don't ever see that changing.
I compare those (long-term roadmaps) with automakers showing-off concept-cars, and I like what John Gruber wrote about those[1]:
> Concept designs (and worse, concept videos) are a sign of dysfunction and incompetence at a company. It’s playing make-believe while fooling yourself and your audience into thinking you’re doing something real. Concepts allow designers to ignore real-world constraints: engineering, pricing, manufacturing, legal regulations, sometimes even physics. But dealing with real-world constraints is the hard work of true design. Concepts don’t stem from a lack of confidence. They stem from a dereliction of the actual duties of design.
Similarly, this vacuous concept-of-a roadmap from IBM is clearly free from real-world constraints; constraints like AI telling people to eat rocks...
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2020/01/concept_electronics_show
therein•1h ago
Also all this "vision 2030" stuff are getting too over the top.
throwaw12•1h ago
But I like it, you can expect some of these terms more frequently in upcoming years, which can shape your investment decisions. People buy the hype, if you are early in the hype cycle you can increase your investments