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IBM the Next Great Software Company?
Diomidis Spinellis writes "A report in this week's Economist discusses IBM's globalization strategy and the company's presence in India. Refreshingly, the article admits that there's more to outsourcing than cheap labor, contrasting IBM's calculated investments with Apple's rapid pull-out from Bangalore. Although the jury is still out on how sluggish multinationals can compete with vigorous tigers, it seems that IBM has a credible strategy for becoming the next great software company, and that outsourcing is only a part of the puzzle."
As far as I can tell, IBM's strategy is to make crummy products, sell them to gullible IT departments (or habitual ones that buy IBM just because it's IBM), then sell expensive consulting services to make their crummy products work nearly as well as the cheaper competition. Sadly, IBM seems to have a stranglehold on healthcare.
The textbook case would, of course, be Lotus Domino/Notes. Which is more expensive per-seat than Outlook/Exchange and lacks many (I would say very basic) features that Outlook gives you as part of the package. To make matters worse, it has terrible usability and runs sluggish to annoy your users. For only massive amounts of moolah, you can hire IBM consultants to halfway kind of fix these problems, maybe.
Sure, Microsoft sells consulting services as well, but the difference is that the Microsoft products at least work pretty well on their own for the majority of businesses, so only huge shops really need to involve Microsoft consultants in the process.
But, hey, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
Comment of the year
The answer is no... have you seen their ManageNow software?!
Glad to see the juvenile racist crap that we used to see spat at articles like this almost instantly seems to be gone.
"Thank you, come again!"
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.