Over the years, I watched IBM go in different directions with what I thought were scatterbrained marketing efforts that confused most people, including me. Smart Grid? Smarter Planet? A rotating cast of cloud brands and rebrands? Pick a direction, please. But here’s the thing: I don’t think they had a choice. They could either straddle both worlds and hope for the best, ready to pivot if needed or commit to one way or the other and risk making a bad bet that could kill the company. It’s hard to be a Monday morning quarterback when those kinds of stakes are in play.
What I would have done
Still, if I had been in that CTO’s seat, I would have created a unique and innovative strategy unlike anything else in the marketplace. After all, it’s IBM. They had the juice, they had the brainpower no other company had, and they had the ability to pull it off. I would have put all the eggs in that basket and moved forward as quickly as possible, making as many mistakes as I could as fast as I could, readjusting to different market conditions where we could be successful.
I’m not sure that bet would have been building another public cloud. I think I would have doubled down on the existing hardware business and being the absolute best in the world at it—not just mainframes, but small distributed systems, the kind of well-engineered on-premises platforms that companies like Dell provide these days. I would have gone all in and owned that market, even while absorbing endless criticism: “IBM is missing the cloud path!” “How will IBM survive without being in the cloud?” Yada, yada, yada. IBM would have survived just fine. Hardware assets, as we’re seeing with high flyers like Dell, HPE, and Nvidia, are becoming king again, and on-premises solutions are often the best, most cost-effective path. That case could have been made 15 years ago when public clouds started to rise. The criticism would have been loud at first, but it would have faded once the strategy took off.
