IBM: A New PR Direction without Recipes and TV Game Shows?
August 18, 2020
IBM appears to be shifting its marketing in an interesting way. IBM announced its Power10 chips. Representative of the coverage is Forbes’ Magazine’s “IBM POWER10 Mega Chip For Hybrid Cloud Is Revealed.” The write up is not written by Forbes’ staff. The article is from an outfit called Tirias Research, a member of a contributor group. I am not sure what a contributor group is. The article seems like marketing speak to me, but you judge for yourself. Here’s a snippet:
To handle the ever more complex cloud workloads, the POWER10 improves capacity (socket throughput) and efficiency by about 3x over the POWER9. The energy efficiency gains were critical because IBM increased CPU core count over the POWER9 but kept the socket power roughly the same. All in all, the POWER10 big step forward for the architecture.
Next, I noticed write ups about IBM’s mainframe business. Navigate to “COBOL Still Handles 70% of Global Business Transactions.” The content strikes me as a recycling of IBM-prepared visuals. Here’s an example of the “analysis” and “news” in the article about the next big future:
Several observations:
- It was not that long ago that IBM was touting IBM Watson as capable of matching pets with potential owners. Now IBM is focusing on semiconductors and “workhorse” mainframes
- There are chips using technology more advanced than IBM’s 7 and 14 nanometer chips. Like Intel, IBM makes no reference to manufacturing techniques which may offer more advantages. That’s understandable. But three nanometer fabs are approaching, and IBM appears to be following, not leading.
- The cheerleading for hybrid clouds is different from cheerleading for “the cloud.” Has IBM decided that its future pivots on getting companies to build data centers and hire IBM to maintain them.
The craziness of the state unemployment agencies with COBOL based systems is fresh in my mind. For me, emphasizing the dependence of organizations upon COBOL is interesting. This statement caught my attention:
COBOL still handle [sic] more than 70% of the business transactions that take place in the world today.
Is this a good thing? Are Amazon, Microsoft, and Google embracing mainframes? My hunch is that companies are unable to shift from legacy systems. Inertia, not innovation, may be creating what some people seeking unemployment benefits from COBOL-centric systems perceive as a dysfunctional approach.
Net net: At least IBM is not talking about recipes created by Watson.
Stephen E Arnold, August 18, 2020
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