International BUSINESS Machines

right off the bat, i want to disclaim that i am not doing any further research on this, i am making some assumptions, and even if my assumptions are false, my point is still the same.

i was recently talking with a friend about keyboards, and i remembered the good old IBM M2 buckling spring keyboard that geeks know and love and lust after. it’s a great keyboard, it has a very satisfying tactile feedback to it, and is a pleasure to type on. i was wondering why IBM hadn’t realized the market. you can go on ebay and find one from the 90s for about $150 or so. for a $30 keyboard. to me, i felt that was ignoring a potential market.

then i remembered or realized or thought that IBM sold their rights to the M2 style keyboards to a company called Lexmark. realizing that, it struck me how that’s exactly the right thing to do. IBM isn’t a keyboard manufacturer. why would they stay in the market to do that? they build business machines, and while a keyboard may be a part of a business machine, it’s agnostic to the machine it is attached to.

so i thought about thinkpads. they’re business machines, why did IBM sell that to Lenovo? because ThinkPads use intel processors. not IBM PowerPC or Cell processors. so again, why would IBM continue to support that, and spend money on something that is more a consumer product, than a business product?

i kind of like that, and i wish i would see more of it, amongst the companies that are around today. why continue to spend R&D money, time and talent on problems that aren’t in-line with your original business plan? why is google doing maps? why is apple doing cloud? why is … doing …?

between that and learning about Thomas J. Watson and his THINK campaign and how he did things in the early days at IBM, i realized IBM is doing things ‘properly’ and that is why i would like to work for them, or a company like them.

Thomas J. Watson encouraged employees to go over figures and policies and procedures and THINK. become familiar with them, find flaws in them, help improve them. he spoke out against drinking during business hours, but he also realized a need for camaraderie. there were IBM ‘clubhouses’ at one point (perhaps still are), where employees could socialize and play pool and relax. off hours.

that sort of compassion for your employees is exactly what the big companies are trying to lure talent in with, right now. the company i used to work for had a bar in the office. i had a bottle of whiskey on my desk, and drank whiskey and coke when i got stressed. noone ever said ‘dude, this isn’t the right place for that’ as much as i wanted, secretly, someone to say SOMETHING.

i took my job here because i was sold a pack of lies about how the company who hired me was so focused on employee satisfaction, and how the company was like a familiy, and so on. when i ran into a personal issue that was causing me distress, my coworkers responded by saying ‘i don’t care about your personal life’ and went back to what they were doing.

that lack of compassion or understanding that people have stress outside of work is appalling. even someone i know who has professional connections to IBM has told me i’m all but unhirable there, because i have an outspoken personal life.

why does what i do off company hours matter one single bit to my employer? surely your companies reputation isn’t so fragile that a boat rocker such as myself won’t cause your company to capsize, will it? and if it will, perhaps we should look into why, and develop a more stable ground.

addendum: ok, i lied, i did a little research. when i was at the Computer History Museum, they mentioned the IBM Roadrunner, a supercomputer using the Cell processor. they mentioned, at the museum, that the super computer uses the same processor as in the Playstation 3. that’s wrong.

Sony, IBM and Toshiba did the R&D to get the Cell from drawing board to reality. IBM used Sony’s pockets to fund it, for the new PS3, intending to use it for bigger and better things than gaming.

oh, and Roadrunner runs linux.

“IBM built the computer for the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration.[6][7] It is a hybrid design with 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i[8] and 6,480 AMD Opteron dual-core processors[9] in specially designed blade servers connected by Infiniband. The Roadrunner uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux along with Fedora[10] as its operating systems and is managed with xCAT distributed computing software. It also uses the Open MPI Message Passing Interface implementation.[11] Roadrunner occupies approximately 560 square metres (6,000 sq ft)[12] and became operational in 2008.”

“444.94 megaflops per watt of power used.” a megaflop is 1,000,000 floating operations. that is to say a FLoating OPeration is maths that use floating point values. it’s considerably trickier than integer operations, and requires more chip hardware or software to do. 444,940,000 operations … per WATT of power consumed. basic research shows the iphone charger uses 7 watts of power to charge an iphone.

you can charge your iphone with that power, or perform 3,114,580,000 floating point operations. how do you want to see power utilized?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_microprocessor