It must be the Cringely bashing month....

How much longer are you intending on stringing this out Ashley? Robert has brought some great books to us and given the people who know who he is a few laughs along the way, leave the poor guy alone. You are right with what you are saying (unless Robert really does know something we don't) but it's starting to be a bit of a soap opera with us waiting for the next instalment of the Cringley Bash. 3 articles is enough, give it a rest.

Oh rly?

And a personal bashing it is not?

Maybe a career in entertainment would be better kind sir. There we have no shortage of cheap shots for you to have a go at.

Good work calling Cringely on his obvious errors. The fact that the guy posts on PBS and is therefore viewed as "free press" would be laughable if it wasn't for the fact that clearly some people are going to fall for it... I can only imagine that there's some other agenda going on that we don't know about, because some of the stuff the guy posts is irrational (150K layoffs in a country where the company only has 120K employees? Give me a break!).

Well done for keeping us nearer the truth :o)

C

"The layoffs, mostly in the US, follow a similar round of 1,300 cuts performed earlier this month. IBM described the firings as "business as usual" and noted that it hired 14,000 people worldwide during the first four months of this year"

They might not be 150,000 but to me laying off about 3,000 people and pointing out that you have hired 14,000 somewhere else to reinforce that it's just "business as usual" (and preserve investors' confidence of course) is still rather sickening.

Dear Ashley

My dog would eat your dog.

Since when was this a blog/forum? I write the comments, you write the articles. In the meantime, silence!

Kind regards,

Butch

Not some copyright registered moniker like "Dear Abby".

This appears to have been put in the wrong section (Financial News) ...

... surely it should be under the "Continued bitching about a journalist who spilt my drink or got better freebies at a party months ago" section.

I like to read some of your articles from time to time, but you don't quite know what you are talking about. I found Cringley's article to be more a reliable effort of relaying information about what is happening at IBM, than your ill fated attempt at journalism mixed with comedy.

You guys are annoying sometimes. And I work for IBM, and yes.. there is a LEAN. If you didn't learn anything from Cringley's article, why don't you go read some of the 1000+ comments. That'll give you a better picture of IBM, as most of them were written by fellow IBMers.

Please, stick to other topics and leave the IBM reporting to the people that know. My exposure to LEAN so far tells me without a doubt that it's all about breaking down the IT specialist's job into several assembly lines, and cross training every other monkey to be able to do the same job. Therefore, when it comes time to reduce staff, it won't cause an impact as there are many monkeys who are cross trained to do the job, and some of roles and responsibilities can be offshored to more monkeys in far away countries.

So go ahead.. write another funny article why don't you.

Lets see...

Fire 1300 then another 1500 US based employees. Hire 15K elsewhere in the world ...

Yup that sounds about right...

And IBM wonders why they have a bad rep.

When Cringely says 150,000, does he mean only employees, or people, as in employees and contractors. I know many contractors who have been laid off in the past few months, and I know that many IBMers who have left have not been replaced.

It might have been a year ago that Cringely suggested that any SA in Global Services look for another job. His words didn't fall on deaf ears. Most of the folks who left the site I worked at have not been replaced.

I'd like to see the number of contractors that IBM has, and then you can continue to bash Cringely. In the mean time, his words have been helpful to many people who didn't see the writing on the wall prior to his articles.

I've seen most contractors let go, and am now seeing peers being let go, I keep wondering when will it be me. I'm starting to see peers also leave for other companies... the hand writting is definitely on the wall, it's not a wise thing to work for IBM, stay away from them, they're headed for their death.....

Bob might be spot on with 150,000

My reasoning? Well I used to work as a contractor for IBM in Poughkeepsie, got 2 days notice in March that I wasn't needed anymore... Now work 45 miles away from home instead of 15 but make MUCH more and work for an infintely nicer Company!

Anyway back to the plot... The Poughkeepsie Journal has kept tabs on the lay-offs this year and the tally locally is 69 (Poughkeepsie is an IBM City with the Poughkeepsie plant and the East Fishkill 300mm fab as the major employers)

So 69 Blue Badgers got canned, but at the same time 1000 Contractors and Supplementals also got their pink slips... That makes it about a 14:1 ratio ... Reflect that Nationwide and you'd only need 10000 regular Beemer jobs to go and you would have the 150000 Bob mentioned...

Here is a link to the Newspaper article, the comments section is pretty interesting too!

http://www.pojonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070531/BUSINESS01/705310341

Might be a case of the Bob bashers having to eat Humble Pie while Bob can wear his "I told you so" T-Shirt!!

As an aside I ran into a Blue Badge workmate of mine in the Supermarket last Sunday... He says the building we used to work in is a ghost town and the parking lots (which you used to have to get into before 8am to prevent a very long walk indeed) are practically empty...