Marketing Baloney: IBM Gets Social
May 17, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to DQ Week’s story “IBM Intros Networking and Collaboration Services” here. I don’t think too much about IBM unless it is in the context of a wizard who jumps from Big Blue into the paws of Googzilla. My tracking Ramanathan Guha of programmable search engine fame is one example of the IBM contribution to the GOOG. The passage that caught my attention was this segment of the news story:
“There has never been a better time to harness social technology and drive some of the world’s most important transformations-from energy to healthcare,” said Himanshu Goyal, Country Manager-Academic Initiative, Developer Works and Globalization, IBM India. “IBM is the only vendor that can bring collaboration technology and content together to help developers maximize their productivity and tackle new IT challenges by quickly establishing a worldwide network of peers.”
First, I am not sure the present economic climate is the “better time” for me to buy stuff from IBM. Second, I just think it is silly to assert that IBM is the “only vendor that can bring collaboration technology and content together”. Categorical affirmatives! Give me a break. Finally, “tackle new IT challenges?” How about resolving the old IT challenges.
At the Mark Logic user conference last week I overhead a conversation about the inability of one large customer in the publishing world to shake free quickly and economically from the shackles of its IBM mainframe past. IBM jumps from trend to trend in an effort to use consulting firm hot insight type marketing with the slogging of services, software, and hardware. The big companies used to gulp this concoction down without a thought.
Now, I am not so sure. As a result, IBM turns up the hyperbole generator. The one thing that this quote tells me is that search is not number one. Collaboration is. Gee, I wonder if IBM remembers Lotus Notes? What about those forms that allow me to input content into a DB2 data system? I thought I saw an annotation feature running on the Omnifind search system last year as well? Those “innovations” apparently don’t sell today as well as “transformation”.
Stephen Arnold, May 17, 2009
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