IBM makes millions off patents, but it could make billions with open source

"While patent collectors will often claim that their portfolio is a good indicator of the deep research and development they do, rarely do we see patent heft translate directly into product success. Why? Because rarely do products succeed simply because of technical merit.

Instead, the most successful companies are those that can execute (sales, marketing, etc.) around a product, whatever its technical merits. In this area, IBM has largely failed over the last decade...

IBM has long been one of the pioneers in open source software, which is where most usable innovation seems to be happening today. From TensorFlow to Apache Kafka to Kubernetes, if IBM wants to compete with modern technology giants like Google and Microsoft, it needs to innovate in the same way they do, too. Yes, they still gather patents, but their more interesting work emerges as open source software."

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Gearing Up for the Cloud, AT&T Tells Its Workers: Adapt, or Else; New York Times, 2/13/16

Quentin Hardy, New York Times; Gearing Up for the Cloud, AT&T Tells Its Workers: Adapt, or Else:

"To Mr. Stephenson, it should be an easy choice for most workers: Learn new skills or find your career choices are very limited.
“There is a need to retool yourself, and you should not expect to stop,” he said in a recent interview at AT&T’s Dallas headquarters. People who do not spend five to 10 hours a week in online learning, he added, “will obsolete themselves with the technology.”...
By 2020, Mr. Stephenson hopes AT&T will be well into its transformation into a computing company that manages all sorts of digital things: phones, satellite television and huge volumes of data, all sorted through software managed in the cloud.
That can’t happen unless at least some of his work force is retrained to deal with the technology. It’s not a young group: The average tenure at AT&T is 12 years, or 22 years if you don’t count the people working in call centers. And many employees don’t have experience writing open-source software or casually analyzing terabytes of customer data."