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IBM Says its Future is in Services, Not Goods
TFGeditor writes "An article at Technology Review quotes IBM exec Paul Horn saying that the company's business model is shifting from goods and products to software and services. From the article: 'Horn's challenge, then, has been to take a $6 billion research organization dedicated to work that advances technology products and get it to do work that benefits service businesses. IBM is thus in the process of answering an important question for all technology companies: can corporations perform useful research in the services arena?'"
Just in case doesn't get the joke behind that ";)" in the thread title, GM bonds are about to be downgraded to junk.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2005/0425/112.html
a) Produce Nothing.
If we could only get rid of farm subsidies we would be doing this already.
b) Consume Everything.
Except the services we sell to all the other countries who have no clue how to efficiently produce their goods., build their power plants, feed their ever growing populations, and cure their sick. We currently have the best university system available (with the exception of possibly England - but theirs is not as widely avaliable) and that translates into the best educated country in the world. Which translates into valuable services. And I would much rather live in a country full of doctors and biologists and engineers than a country of assembly line workers and farmers. The aforementioned jobs all translate to a higher quality of life.
c) Print lots and lots of worthless dollar bills.
Is a dollar bill worth anything right now anyway? It is just good faith and the accepted exchangable value.
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
If you don't know what Avenue A is, how do you know it's spyware? Perhaps you are mistaking a cookie for spyware?
Cool web site. I'll see your statistic and raise you a more relevant one: rate of enrollment in tertiary education.
I think there's a general consensus that American higher education (undergraduate, postgraduate, and professional) is still the class of the world. Both its quality and its accessibility to outsiders play a role. When American, European, Asian, and African students all start flooding into the burgeoning universities of India, China, France, or wherever else, that consensus will change. But the global brain drain is still real, and unidirectional.
IBM is actually the largest software developer in the world. Difference is that its mostly internal stuff (damn near everything here is IBM made).
can't sleep slashdot will eat me