A memo went out this week to managers in IBM’s U.S. Integrated Technology Services division requiring that future use of additional sub-contract (1099) workers must be approved in advance by a director or vice president. This includes coverage for sick days and vacations, not to mention inevitable customer emergencies. The memo further required that the renewal of any ongoing 1099 contracts include an across-the-board 10 percent reduction in labor rates to IBM. While this may not sound like news, inside ITS it has great meaning since the company has already been cut to the bone. There are, for example, reportedly two remaining IBM experts on HP-UX, HP’s version of Unix. Yet IBM supports customer running […]
The New IBM — vampires in our midst
Doug Engelbart, visionary
Geniuses can be found on every street corner in Silicon Valley, but visionaries are much less common. Geniuses are good at completing tasks while visionaries are the first to recognize tasks that need completion. And of all the visionaries none were greater or had a longer range view than Doug Engelbart, who died last night at age 88.
To most people who recognize his name Doug Engelbart was the inventor of the computer mouse but he was much, much more than that. In addition to the mouse and the accompanying chord keyboard, Doug invented computer time sharing, network computing, graphical computing, the graphical user interface and (with apologies to Ted Nelson) hypertext links. And he invented all […]
IBM to customers: Your hand is staining my window
A month ago I began hearing about impending layoffs at IBM, but what could I say beyond “layoffs are coming?” This time my first clues came not from American IBMers but from those working for Big Blue abroad. Big layoffs were coming, they feared, following an earnings shortfall that caused panic in Armonk with the prospect that IBM might after all miss its long-stated earnings target for 2015. Well the layoffs began hitting a couple weeks ago just before I went into an involuntary technical shutdown trying to move this rag from one host to another. So I, who like to be the first to break these stories, have to in this case write the […]
Snowden and the NSA reflect a millennial climate change
Snowdon (not Snowden) is the name of the tallest mountain in Wales and while by Swiss or Colorado standards it may not seem like much the weather on Snowdon is unpredictable and has taken many lives. I climbed Snowdon as a schoolboy with my class and that day on the mountain another school group was lost in a blizzard and some boys died. This is what first came to mind when I heard about National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaking documents and fleeing to Hong Kong. Like his namesake mountain, this Snowden is trouble for those who are overconfident or unwary.
I’ve written about this general topic many times over the years and doing a […]
How American Airlines lost its computer
This is not a big story, but I find it interesting. Last week American Airlines had its reservations computer system — called SABRE — go offline for most of a day leading to the cancellation of more than 700 flights. Details are still sketchy (here’s American’s video apology) but this is beginning to look like a classic example of a system that became too integrated and a company that was too dependent on a single technology.
To be clear, according to American the SABRE system did not itself fail, what failed was the airline’s access to its own system — a networking problem. And for further clarification, American no longer owns SABRE, […]
