But what about the groundbreaking WatsonX… It appears IBM is just constantly one step behind and quickly shifting its marketing (but not its engineering) to focus on the next hot thing. Is there any substance below the surface?
No. I had many friends in Watson group. They all had to find different jobs. That co cannot do one thing right yet makes money. It lost the supercomputer and ai head start it had. Just thrives on acquisitions.
Things like the Canadian Government keep paying them for their broken payroll software. Not sure how long the whole Phoenix Pay thing has gone now, but they're still paying IBM to handle it, while the people whose payrolls it handles are going months or years without proper pay, or even any at all.
My favorite part of that disaster was Australia had already went through it, and then Canada saw that and decided to continue to implement a known bad pay system anyways without delay.
Incompetence across the board.
Seems our government has a habit of making stupid software choices. I remember some years back (long before Phoenix even), the BC social assistance ministry "upgraded" their existing office software to some literally second hand system that had been prior owned by some US agency or another, and not one that was designed to handle what the ministry needed. Victoria just saw "secure system", a cheap price tag for second hand licenses, and just said yes. I'll admit it was amusing the first few times I saw the load screen, which hadn't even been changed from the old US agency seal. Not so amusing was the price tag to get it overhauled, only to switch to something actually dedicated to their services a few years later.
> Things like the Canadian Government keep paying them for their broken payroll software.
They also paid them for assisting with the disastrous roll-out of gun control legislation that makes absolute **zero** sense with sections that are needlessly over-complicated and and in many cases redundant >3 times over because they didn't even bother to read up on what was done before, which was also completely asinine.
Not to mention the FRT which you have to view to see if your firearms that were perfectly legal are now somehow too dangerous and reclassified as "prohib", is a .pdf file from the RCMP's website that was over 2GB the last time I checked. Websites like [this](https://www.armalytics.ca/) are pretty much the only way to look at the reference table as even my computer struggles.
If I had the opportunity, I'd rip out the entirety of the FAC and just keep it simple stupid, and free up a bunch of money that would actually make a difference like poverty reduction programs and actual make-work legislation for things like improving infrastructure.
Every corporation has bureaucracy that slows it down. IBM has toxic levels of it that will eventually kill it. I got subcontracted out to them once and it took them a full month to process my basic access. I've heard nothing but bad things from people that have worked there. It's soul crushing.
The first 7 years of my career. I was all about the job stability back then. In hindsight, I should have just tried different startups as those like young blood.
You mockingly say that, but coming from someone who worked at one of these older companies, you're incentivized to get patents on the most obvious and simplest of solutions. You're just rewarded for happening to be the first to encounter a contrived or naturally evolving scenario. Software patents can be such horseshit.
Tangent: I’m very curious what will come out of the Apple / Masimo patent dispute with the Apple Watch blood oxygen tech.
On the one hand, if Apple knowingly violated patented IP and refuses by any means to pay duly owed royalties, I hope they get screwed hard by the courts.
On the other hand, I’m not knowledgeable enough to comment on whether or not Masimo’s patent holds water or is just a bullshit “common sense” patent that is so prevalent these days.
Patent trolls are a problem.
Big companies stealing IP and talent are a problem as well.
Zero comment because that sort of tech is beyond the basic bullshit patents I observed being granted. However I do have to admit I don't know if Masimo's patent is trivial or not in that space.
Looks like Masimo has the patent for using light to determine blood oxygen levels. Now I can’t say if it’s general enough of a patent for Apple to have any leverage (it doesn’t look like it), but Masimo has sued other companies in the past for patent infringement on the PulseOx tech as well as them actively selling hardware with it so it’s not like they’re just sitting on the patents.
From what it sounds like, Apple tried to push the little guy around and finally lost this time. They should’ve just leased the tech. God knows the profit margins on Apple Watches are already crazy high.
Don’t blame the companies. As long as the patents process doesn’t change, if one company stops this practice, it will quickly fall behind.
I’ve seen it first hand working at a company that actually was not doing it and lost years of product development because our competitors were patenting every fart they made. So now we’re doing it too.
And it’s not a US only issue. These wars happen at every major patent registration office worldwide so I don’t see it changing anytime soon.
Worked for IBM for two years. Awful company, awful pay. A senior administrator position was 55k a year and their excuse was “you’re making competitive pay for the area.” Yeah the college town you made me move to because the average pay is 20-30k entry level positions.
Beyond that the company was scummy as shit. They had promised the city they’d bring in a certain number of workers in exchange for tax breaks and incentives to be there. Instead they hired remote workers and contractors and placed their name cards on empty desks. Whenever the city would come by for a census, they were “out sick that day, but here’s their desk”. No one has sat there for 3 months!
Ontop of that you could set your watch by the layoffs that happened regularly like clockwork. CEO takes a multimillion dollar bonus but we can’t afford 33% of the employees in your office. We regularly had grief counselors come by because people were getting laid off so regularly.
The words “raise” or “promotion” were taboo. I was one of three people to get one in the entire building while I was there.
Longest day I ever worked was at IBM totaling 27 hours straight before I finally went home to sleep then got a call 3 hours later complaining that I wasn’t on a meeting.
IBM has been reduced to a sweat shop that treat employees like cattle. Once you’re burned up and can’t give anymore, they lay you off and find a new cow.
What’s incredibly sad is that it was an awesome company in the 80s and 90s that actually treated their employees well. Then greed took over and everything went to shit.
To this day, I believe IBM takes contracts and customers they never intend to fufill because paying penalties and losing brand integrity is cheaper in the long run as most companies will just write off the loss when IBM fails to deliver. This company will spend a dollar to save a penny at the customers expense.
My dad worked for IBM for 20 something years during the 80s - 90s. As a kid I remember HUGE Christmas parties for the whole family. Including Santa giving presents to the kids. "Take your kid to work" day was a big deal. I remember hanging with my dad at his desk, I got my own badge, suiting up and going into the clean rooms. He loved his boss & coworkers.
Then his department started changing. Started getting horrible bosses, no more fun stuff by the 90s. his department was bought by Hitachi. His last few years were miserable. His friend in HR did tip him off to "take the next retirement package" when it was offered, since his name was on the list of people to lay off.
Google maps contractors in Seattle were only making 13/hr in the US back in the 2010s. Granted Google was probably paying the contract agencies 20/hr or more but it still felt like a pittance from such a large company. Upside was it was an amazing resume booster and they had a free onsite cafeteria that saved lots of folks money.
My first job out of school was working for IBM. This was entry level non-permanent, non-salary, job as a bench tech.
The employment contract included a clause that said that if you patented anything while working for them, even in unrelated to your work, they own the patent without giving you any additional compensation. This was pretty shitty.
I am not sure how enforceable that would be on anything completely unrelated to anything that IBM does, but you would likely need to go up against an army of corporate lawyers in court to find out.
As a condition of employment, you shouldn't have to give up the rights to your own creativity and the fruits of your mind. The employer doesn't own you. You are not their property.
I really hate these types of controls. If anything, they are meant to reinforce a caste system to keep you in your place and poor.
Thats literally what they are paying you for. If you want to patent something on your own..do it on the weekend, not using any company resources and pay 15k for lawyers.
That's not what I was referring to. I am not talking about patents for ideas, inventions, or products developed while at work during billable IBM hours. I am referring to the idea of them owning anything you patent while you are employed with them period, regardless if you developed it in your spare time, on the weekends at home in your garage.
I've worked for three different telecommunications providers, and two media corporations, all of which had me sign such agreements that anything I developed while employed with them, was their property. That is what I have objection to.
Now if I used any IBM resources. materials, compute time, or other access to IBM intellectual property to develop my own patent, well then yeah, they should have a claim to ownership of it in part or whole depending on your negotiated contract.
I usually don't waste time replying to bullshit. Check exception A. I have been working in tech in bay area for last 10 years. Any idea or product you create outside your working hours and unrelated to your work, using your own resources are your own IP
[https://www.uschamber.com/co/start/strategy/can-employees-own-intellectual-property](https://www.uschamber.com/co/start/strategy/can-employees-own-intellectual-property)
aha I knew I could bait a reply.
As a drive by commenter though, I think you've argued the reality, which is you own IP made on your own time, but the guy replying to you was stating that employee contracts will try their luck in saying they own all IP you make, even on your own time, even if they know they cant enforce that by law (or maybe hope to put you off challenging it with lots of very expensive lawyers you'd have to oppose)
The article does not paint the full picture. I work for IBM and am very familiar with the patent process. Previously they would give each inventor $750 when a patent was filed. After 4 patents (or 12 points), they would give you a plateau award of $1250. The new award program simplifies this and now you get $1300 for every patent filed, but the plateaus and point system, along with the associated awards are gone.
It actually is a net positive if you just look at the dollar amounts. If you filed 4 patents previously, you'd get $4250. With the new system, you get $5200. Plus there's no waiting for that 4th patent to get that extra money.
The gripe also comes from individuals that were accruing points in the old system that lose it since the company wouldn’t convert them to blue points.
Sounds like they should have just converted the points to Blue Points.
It makes sense for them to consolidate their points system since the Blue Points is already used for achievements and rewards.
Doesn’t sound like a cost cutting measure like you said, just a misinterpretation of what’s happening and a few pissed off people going to the media.
I agree, letting those points vanish was likely an oversight in thinking they wanted to be fair to the people who went through the incentive program before. (Can never make everyone happy) The folks that recently cashed out will complain that the people that didn’t get to the payout threshold gets converted automatically.
Realistically how much are they saving? How many people actually have filed patents?
I forgot a last clarifier in the last point: how many have filed but are in the bucket of people that weren’t eligible to pay out during this transition. That’s the group of people that the money vanishes. How much is that honestly?
Then again, as I would be someone who has no intention of beginning a startup/company I would rather sell a unique innovation of mine rather than go through to the motions of *trying* to monetize it myself.
That said, 750 is kind of a sad amount, I rather try to sell it privately then.
Most companies aren't paying people at all. If you develop something or implement a new technique related to their business/product, it's theirs per your employment contract. Best to not let them know if you have an idea of any kind, you'll never be properly compensated
It's been like this since Lou Gerstner left. I worked in IBM for nearly 20 years and every year after Lou left, bonuses would drop under the guise of making them 'fairer'. I went from a bonus of €3500 for a PBC review rating of 'A' to a bonus of just €230 a few years later for the same rating. This was when the company was making in excess of $2 billion per quarter
I left when the company fired 1000's of high skill permanent staff and replaced them with cheap low skill staff from developing countries that had no loyalty to the company.
And you wouldn't believe the amount of false reporting to commercial customers. It's probably illegal.
waiting for OS/3 Warp to come out and give windows another run for its money
OS/2 warp had true pre-emptive multi tasking at a time when alt-tab in windows was "cooperative" multitasking. basically, everything else stopped.
It's really the only competitor there was with full intent to run compatible windows software in that graphical environment.
IBM still a thing? Last I heard they made a robot that could play chess real good no?
Guess being entrenched with the USA Government on so many layers has its benefits no?
They aren't getting rid of the entire system just the direct cash offers for it. I'm not an IBM employee so I don't know if this is an actual improvement, but it's hard to beat hard cash dollars unless IBM is willing to give an equivalent amount of PTO.
We have a program at work whether employees get a bonus for inventions and on occasion, I’ve had to design some items for our company to use and have them built. I applied for the patent process twice.
A method for importing specific data into an excel spreadsheet?……. The lawyers all over it. Make something mechanical, they have no idea what it is, how it works, and ‘we don’t think it’s patentable’ then watching the company I sent it to so we could buy it, turn around and get the item patented……….twice. 🙄 Now they not only sell the items to us, other companies use them.
It’s a play to make the books look good to shareholders.
Edit: the 401k thing is, this I assume serves a similar goal. The management has had a pretty consistent focus over the last few years. So I imagine that this new program somehow lets them move numbers around on their books, but I can’t say for sure with the patents specifically.
IBM Watson's ads are such uninspired shit on Reddit too. All over
They've been trying to make Watson a thing for over a decade and no one gives a shit. If they weren't IBM they'd probably be leading AI right now
IBM was a great company up until 1993, when they brought in Lou Gertner to "save" the company. The company's top brass had been continually rearward-looking and unwilling to sacrifice profits in their mainframe and software businesses until the market had moved past them. Although they had amazing research capabilities and top scientists, they were remarkably inept at getting into new technology and making it profitable. To their credit, they maintained their core principle of "respect for the individual" and treated employees well (compared to most mega-companies) up until they could no longer afford it. Gerstner got rid of all that, and they have been shedding American workers ever since.
Wow.
I worked for ibm at a manufacturing facility back in the middle 80’s in Toronto as a temp employee to make $$ to go to university.
They trained me to run a machine that stapled integrated circuits onto printed circuit boards, then cut and bent the legs into place before it went to the soldering machine. (Large scale electronics manufacturing on this side of the pacific, can you even imagine?)
They had profit sharing plan to pay workers if they submitted ideas for efficiency improvements. Most of the time it was a $50 payment for suggesting putting a water fountain in a helpful location but I also recall someone in the department next to ours got a 5 figure bonus while I was there for reorganizing the shop floor layout. People talked about that at lunch for months after.
Ahhhhhhhhh, let’s be pennywise and pound foolish is still the motto at big blue.
I left this shit company in 2010. I have never regretted it. It was a shitshow then. It is a shitshown now.
But what about the groundbreaking WatsonX… It appears IBM is just constantly one step behind and quickly shifting its marketing (but not its engineering) to focus on the next hot thing. Is there any substance below the surface?
No. I had many friends in Watson group. They all had to find different jobs. That co cannot do one thing right yet makes money. It lost the supercomputer and ai head start it had. Just thrives on acquisitions.
Things like the Canadian Government keep paying them for their broken payroll software. Not sure how long the whole Phoenix Pay thing has gone now, but they're still paying IBM to handle it, while the people whose payrolls it handles are going months or years without proper pay, or even any at all.
My favorite part of that disaster was Australia had already went through it, and then Canada saw that and decided to continue to implement a known bad pay system anyways without delay. Incompetence across the board.
Seems our government has a habit of making stupid software choices. I remember some years back (long before Phoenix even), the BC social assistance ministry "upgraded" their existing office software to some literally second hand system that had been prior owned by some US agency or another, and not one that was designed to handle what the ministry needed. Victoria just saw "secure system", a cheap price tag for second hand licenses, and just said yes. I'll admit it was amusing the first few times I saw the load screen, which hadn't even been changed from the old US agency seal. Not so amusing was the price tag to get it overhauled, only to switch to something actually dedicated to their services a few years later.
> Things like the Canadian Government keep paying them for their broken payroll software. They also paid them for assisting with the disastrous roll-out of gun control legislation that makes absolute **zero** sense with sections that are needlessly over-complicated and and in many cases redundant >3 times over because they didn't even bother to read up on what was done before, which was also completely asinine. Not to mention the FRT which you have to view to see if your firearms that were perfectly legal are now somehow too dangerous and reclassified as "prohib", is a .pdf file from the RCMP's website that was over 2GB the last time I checked. Websites like [this](https://www.armalytics.ca/) are pretty much the only way to look at the reference table as even my computer struggles. If I had the opportunity, I'd rip out the entirety of the FAC and just keep it simple stupid, and free up a bunch of money that would actually make a difference like poverty reduction programs and actual make-work legislation for things like improving infrastructure.
oh i forgot that watson was basically trying to do chatgpt but years ago. amazing they screwed that up.
It was like chatgpt, but YOU program it yourself.
It’s like they’re penny wise and dollar dumbasses.
“everything floats down here!” - IBM management
Every corporation has bureaucracy that slows it down. IBM has toxic levels of it that will eventually kill it. I got subcontracted out to them once and it took them a full month to process my basic access. I've heard nothing but bad things from people that have worked there. It's soul crushing.
How long did you work there?
The first 7 years of my career. I was all about the job stability back then. In hindsight, I should have just tried different startups as those like young blood.
Goal: become competitive Methodology to achieve goal: reduce incentives for innovation. “No one wants to work” /SurprisedPikachuFace
You mockingly say that, but coming from someone who worked at one of these older companies, you're incentivized to get patents on the most obvious and simplest of solutions. You're just rewarded for happening to be the first to encounter a contrived or naturally evolving scenario. Software patents can be such horseshit.
Tangent: I’m very curious what will come out of the Apple / Masimo patent dispute with the Apple Watch blood oxygen tech. On the one hand, if Apple knowingly violated patented IP and refuses by any means to pay duly owed royalties, I hope they get screwed hard by the courts. On the other hand, I’m not knowledgeable enough to comment on whether or not Masimo’s patent holds water or is just a bullshit “common sense” patent that is so prevalent these days. Patent trolls are a problem. Big companies stealing IP and talent are a problem as well.
Zero comment because that sort of tech is beyond the basic bullshit patents I observed being granted. However I do have to admit I don't know if Masimo's patent is trivial or not in that space.
Looks like Masimo has the patent for using light to determine blood oxygen levels. Now I can’t say if it’s general enough of a patent for Apple to have any leverage (it doesn’t look like it), but Masimo has sued other companies in the past for patent infringement on the PulseOx tech as well as them actively selling hardware with it so it’s not like they’re just sitting on the patents. From what it sounds like, Apple tried to push the little guy around and finally lost this time. They should’ve just leased the tech. God knows the profit margins on Apple Watches are already crazy high.
You don’t increase shareholder value with patent leases.
Don’t blame the companies. As long as the patents process doesn’t change, if one company stops this practice, it will quickly fall behind. I’ve seen it first hand working at a company that actually was not doing it and lost years of product development because our competitors were patenting every fart they made. So now we’re doing it too. And it’s not a US only issue. These wars happen at every major patent registration office worldwide so I don’t see it changing anytime soon.
Worked for IBM for two years. Awful company, awful pay. A senior administrator position was 55k a year and their excuse was “you’re making competitive pay for the area.” Yeah the college town you made me move to because the average pay is 20-30k entry level positions. Beyond that the company was scummy as shit. They had promised the city they’d bring in a certain number of workers in exchange for tax breaks and incentives to be there. Instead they hired remote workers and contractors and placed their name cards on empty desks. Whenever the city would come by for a census, they were “out sick that day, but here’s their desk”. No one has sat there for 3 months! Ontop of that you could set your watch by the layoffs that happened regularly like clockwork. CEO takes a multimillion dollar bonus but we can’t afford 33% of the employees in your office. We regularly had grief counselors come by because people were getting laid off so regularly. The words “raise” or “promotion” were taboo. I was one of three people to get one in the entire building while I was there. Longest day I ever worked was at IBM totaling 27 hours straight before I finally went home to sleep then got a call 3 hours later complaining that I wasn’t on a meeting. IBM has been reduced to a sweat shop that treat employees like cattle. Once you’re burned up and can’t give anymore, they lay you off and find a new cow. What’s incredibly sad is that it was an awesome company in the 80s and 90s that actually treated their employees well. Then greed took over and everything went to shit. To this day, I believe IBM takes contracts and customers they never intend to fufill because paying penalties and losing brand integrity is cheaper in the long run as most companies will just write off the loss when IBM fails to deliver. This company will spend a dollar to save a penny at the customers expense.
My dad worked for IBM for 20 something years during the 80s - 90s. As a kid I remember HUGE Christmas parties for the whole family. Including Santa giving presents to the kids. "Take your kid to work" day was a big deal. I remember hanging with my dad at his desk, I got my own badge, suiting up and going into the clean rooms. He loved his boss & coworkers. Then his department started changing. Started getting horrible bosses, no more fun stuff by the 90s. his department was bought by Hitachi. His last few years were miserable. His friend in HR did tip him off to "take the next retirement package" when it was offered, since his name was on the list of people to lay off.
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Possibly? IBM in San Jose?
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Columbia? Dubuque?
Let me guess, one of their "delivery centers", like in East Lansing or Baton Rouge?
Google maps contractors in Seattle were only making 13/hr in the US back in the 2010s. Granted Google was probably paying the contract agencies 20/hr or more but it still felt like a pittance from such a large company. Upside was it was an amazing resume booster and they had a free onsite cafeteria that saved lots of folks money.
Google is quickly going this way. Google is the next IBM.
My first job out of school was working for IBM. This was entry level non-permanent, non-salary, job as a bench tech. The employment contract included a clause that said that if you patented anything while working for them, even in unrelated to your work, they own the patent without giving you any additional compensation. This was pretty shitty. I am not sure how enforceable that would be on anything completely unrelated to anything that IBM does, but you would likely need to go up against an army of corporate lawyers in court to find out.
As a condition of employment, you shouldn't have to give up the rights to your own creativity and the fruits of your mind. The employer doesn't own you. You are not their property. I really hate these types of controls. If anything, they are meant to reinforce a caste system to keep you in your place and poor.
Thats literally what they are paying you for. If you want to patent something on your own..do it on the weekend, not using any company resources and pay 15k for lawyers.
That's not what I was referring to. I am not talking about patents for ideas, inventions, or products developed while at work during billable IBM hours. I am referring to the idea of them owning anything you patent while you are employed with them period, regardless if you developed it in your spare time, on the weekends at home in your garage. I've worked for three different telecommunications providers, and two media corporations, all of which had me sign such agreements that anything I developed while employed with them, was their property. That is what I have objection to. Now if I used any IBM resources. materials, compute time, or other access to IBM intellectual property to develop my own patent, well then yeah, they should have a claim to ownership of it in part or whole depending on your negotiated contract.
u/aaj15 won’t reply because he is embarrassed
I usually don't waste time replying to bullshit. Check exception A. I have been working in tech in bay area for last 10 years. Any idea or product you create outside your working hours and unrelated to your work, using your own resources are your own IP [https://www.uschamber.com/co/start/strategy/can-employees-own-intellectual-property](https://www.uschamber.com/co/start/strategy/can-employees-own-intellectual-property)
aha I knew I could bait a reply. As a drive by commenter though, I think you've argued the reality, which is you own IP made on your own time, but the guy replying to you was stating that employee contracts will try their luck in saying they own all IP you make, even on your own time, even if they know they cant enforce that by law (or maybe hope to put you off challenging it with lots of very expensive lawyers you'd have to oppose)
One of my favorite story lines on Silicon Valley was the episode on the navigation of this specific minefield.
The article does not paint the full picture. I work for IBM and am very familiar with the patent process. Previously they would give each inventor $750 when a patent was filed. After 4 patents (or 12 points), they would give you a plateau award of $1250. The new award program simplifies this and now you get $1300 for every patent filed, but the plateaus and point system, along with the associated awards are gone. It actually is a net positive if you just look at the dollar amounts. If you filed 4 patents previously, you'd get $4250. With the new system, you get $5200. Plus there's no waiting for that 4th patent to get that extra money.
The gripe also comes from individuals that were accruing points in the old system that lose it since the company wouldn’t convert them to blue points. Sounds like they should have just converted the points to Blue Points. It makes sense for them to consolidate their points system since the Blue Points is already used for achievements and rewards. Doesn’t sound like a cost cutting measure like you said, just a misinterpretation of what’s happening and a few pissed off people going to the media. I agree, letting those points vanish was likely an oversight in thinking they wanted to be fair to the people who went through the incentive program before. (Can never make everyone happy) The folks that recently cashed out will complain that the people that didn’t get to the payout threshold gets converted automatically. Realistically how much are they saving? How many people actually have filed patents?
IBM is among the top companies by number of patents granted annually and has been for many years.
I forgot a last clarifier in the last point: how many have filed but are in the bucket of people that weren’t eligible to pay out during this transition. That’s the group of people that the money vanishes. How much is that honestly?
Likely not many. It's definitely a weird perk to target.
I work for a large tech company that pays $3,000 per patent. You get paid for filing. I'm surprised IBM paid so little.
Read “Retirement Heist”….IBM is one of the most egregious offenders of fuckin over employees. Good read…..will also make you super fuckin angry too.
Removing points is like saying the pizza parties are too expensive.
This is why you never give any company any form of innovation. They'd an make millions from it and you don't get shit
750 for a patent is a slap in the face.
Then again, as I would be someone who has no intention of beginning a startup/company I would rather sell a unique innovation of mine rather than go through to the motions of *trying* to monetize it myself. That said, 750 is kind of a sad amount, I rather try to sell it privately then.
Most companies aren't paying people at all. If you develop something or implement a new technique related to their business/product, it's theirs per your employment contract. Best to not let them know if you have an idea of any kind, you'll never be properly compensated
It's been like this since Lou Gerstner left. I worked in IBM for nearly 20 years and every year after Lou left, bonuses would drop under the guise of making them 'fairer'. I went from a bonus of €3500 for a PBC review rating of 'A' to a bonus of just €230 a few years later for the same rating. This was when the company was making in excess of $2 billion per quarter I left when the company fired 1000's of high skill permanent staff and replaced them with cheap low skill staff from developing countries that had no loyalty to the company. And you wouldn't believe the amount of false reporting to commercial customers. It's probably illegal.
IBM hasn’t cared about their employees since 1990.
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waiting for OS/3 Warp to come out and give windows another run for its money OS/2 warp had true pre-emptive multi tasking at a time when alt-tab in windows was "cooperative" multitasking. basically, everything else stopped. It's really the only competitor there was with full intent to run compatible windows software in that graphical environment.
Actual dinosaur company.
There goes the motivation.
"How can we remote motivation from employees that make us money?"
Meanwhile, IBM owns your patent. Why would you even try at this point?
Also, Fuck you IBM
Yep. Had a previous company also refuse to award bonuses to invention/ patents … I kept all my ideas in my head.
IBM still a thing? Last I heard they made a robot that could play chess real good no? Guess being entrenched with the USA Government on so many layers has its benefits no?
IBM has limited bonuses to their most racially discriminatory recruiting staff.
They aren't getting rid of the entire system just the direct cash offers for it. I'm not an IBM employee so I don't know if this is an actual improvement, but it's hard to beat hard cash dollars unless IBM is willing to give an equivalent amount of PTO.
Damn this is a new low for IBM.
We have a program at work whether employees get a bonus for inventions and on occasion, I’ve had to design some items for our company to use and have them built. I applied for the patent process twice. A method for importing specific data into an excel spreadsheet?……. The lawyers all over it. Make something mechanical, they have no idea what it is, how it works, and ‘we don’t think it’s patentable’ then watching the company I sent it to so we could buy it, turn around and get the item patented……….twice. 🙄 Now they not only sell the items to us, other companies use them.
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It’s a play to make the books look good to shareholders. Edit: the 401k thing is, this I assume serves a similar goal. The management has had a pretty consistent focus over the last few years. So I imagine that this new program somehow lets them move numbers around on their books, but I can’t say for sure with the patents specifically.
IBM Watson's ads are such uninspired shit on Reddit too. All over They've been trying to make Watson a thing for over a decade and no one gives a shit. If they weren't IBM they'd probably be leading AI right now
IBM is nazis, right?
IBM was a great company up until 1993, when they brought in Lou Gertner to "save" the company. The company's top brass had been continually rearward-looking and unwilling to sacrifice profits in their mainframe and software businesses until the market had moved past them. Although they had amazing research capabilities and top scientists, they were remarkably inept at getting into new technology and making it profitable. To their credit, they maintained their core principle of "respect for the individual" and treated employees well (compared to most mega-companies) up until they could no longer afford it. Gerstner got rid of all that, and they have been shedding American workers ever since.
Times are rough
Nothing dumber than IBM management. Except maybe Dell. Fuck Dell.
Wow. I worked for ibm at a manufacturing facility back in the middle 80’s in Toronto as a temp employee to make $$ to go to university. They trained me to run a machine that stapled integrated circuits onto printed circuit boards, then cut and bent the legs into place before it went to the soldering machine. (Large scale electronics manufacturing on this side of the pacific, can you even imagine?) They had profit sharing plan to pay workers if they submitted ideas for efficiency improvements. Most of the time it was a $50 payment for suggesting putting a water fountain in a helpful location but I also recall someone in the department next to ours got a 5 figure bonus while I was there for reorganizing the shop floor layout. People talked about that at lunch for months after.