Cringely on IBM's massive restructuring


Bob Cringely on IBM's Project Chrome reinvention:

In one of the new business units I've heard that everyone is going to be interviewed and will have to give a sales pitch. If you can't sell, you're out. Clearly IBM's declining revenue problem is tempering the organization of this unit. This team will fix the problem by getting rid of the people who can't sell. This is the classic treat the symptom and ignore the cause way of thinking. There are reasons why customers are buying less from IBM. Working harder to sell won't fix those problems. If anything it will probably increase IBM's problems with its customers.

This will be interesting to watch whether IBM emerges stronger, weaker, or simply smaller. "Right-sized" is the management speak, but really that just means getting smaller to match your current state of suckage. That will likely be followed by another in the not too distant future.

Anyway, the interesting question is how this may affect Apple's recent IBM partnership. Apple and IBM last year embarked on an ambitious hardware/services initiative where basically Apple provides the hardware/OS platform with the iPad and helps develop apps supported by IBM services.