I laughed when I saw this; my 14yo looked over to see why I was laughing and asked "what's IBM?"

indeed, child, indeed.

When I was in the final year of college in 04-05 my dream would be to work at IBM. It still had the kind of prestige of R&D in the world. Fast forward a couple of years to 08-09, I don’t recall the event but IBM perception went down and a stone. Was that when they sold the hardware business and became fully consultant?

	▲	dgacmu an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think they started on a long slide starting in the late 90s when they tried to couple research more and more tightly to product deliverables, and then as they pivoted to being a services company, including selling off non-mainframe hardware to Lenovo, to coupling r&d to, uh, I guess services revenue, whatever that means. They had some research layoffs in 2008, at the same time that MSR and Google were really blossoming in research spend and perception, and I think they kind of got left behind. I had a former student go there around 2008 and it seemed like the vibes were starting to sour around then. They maintained some awesome researchers in, e.g., databases, but I think the "make sure you are showing closely how your research directly contributes to services revenue" thing was strong by then and somewhat ruinous for how pleasant a work experience it was for many.
	▲	ofrzeta an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		They only sold the consumer and low-end server hardware line. You can still get IBM servers (Power) and mainframes.