Robert Cringely's The Final Daze: More on IBM's global restructuring is a follow-up column last week's Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM? (discussed here), which drew 1039 comments, a Cringely record.

Some comments took issue. The company pointed out that it has only 132K employees in the U.S., so a minus 150K is not possible. Most were supportive, though, and Cringely stuck to his basic points.

My question does not appear to have been raised (caveat: I have not read all 1039). What is the connection between IBM's FOSS-oriented business strategy and its current concern over its competitive postion? IBM's strategy has been to promote FOSS, especially Apache and Linux, and then make money from selling (1) proprietary applications to connect to them; (2) hardware on which both the operating system and aps run; (3) integration services, using a very broad-based concept that equates IT processes with overall business processes.

Its foe, Microsoft, has an alternative model, which is to concentrate on selling the operating system, making it attractive to all kinds of hardware makers on one end and all kinds of ap writers on the other (while selling its own aps as well), and build the integration into the software so as to minimize the need for services.

For IBM, Global Services has become a major revenue center, but apparently not profitable enough. But can it work better by outsourcing the functions overseas? Many of the commenters are doubtful. Indeed, many claim that the services function is not working well now, and that IBM is degrading the quality of its services-product and living off its great brand name -- the old saw that "no IT manager ever got fired for picking IBM."

One commenter said:

IBM will lose countless customers due to LEAN because all technologies are being considered equal. It simply is not true. UNIX is not the same as Windows or as z/OS. Oracle is not the same as DB2/UDB or DB2 on z/OS. But the damn LEAN consultants from McKenzie (I think) [sic] don't know crap about technology, so they think you can take a z/OS person and have them do a UNIX support job with NO TRAINING.

My question, of course, given my parochial focus on software and the GPL, is what all this means for IBM's support for FOSS generally and for its attitude toward v3 in particular. Is its support for open source software coming out of the services budget, or the software budget -- the allocation of this expense certainly affects the profitability of the functions. Does IBM see too many others free riding on its FOSS investments? The joke about Sun and Java has always been that Sun provided the support while IBM and HP made the money -- does IBM see something similar going on with FOSS? Sun may; it is maneuvering in some oblique ways in connection with open source.

Where does IBM stand on GPLv3, and how does the revision affect its strategy and corporate posture? As I noted in a recent C|Net News piece, there is a lot of silence from big companies about GPLv3.

Maybe Cringely will write follow-up to his follow-up.

posted by James DeLong @ 7:26 AM | Software

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