Clouds gathering above Big Blue's storage empire

Times have changed I guess

"No one ever got fired for buying IBM." I guess that quote isn't going to mean much anymore...

It's too bad, because it's basically a self-fulfilling prophecy. Customers see IBM trying to sell off anything that involves making physical equipment and realize that there isn't much reason to pay the premium for the IBM name anymore. I'm sure low end storage is the next thing to go. We have a fair amount of IBM stuff in our labs and datacenters. It's insanely expensive, and very hard to maintain, but one of the things they do offer is very good on-site service (in my opinion.) We've had situations where they would bend over backwards to get things working again as long as you had a service contract on the equipment. I know most people have had different experiences, but that's what we saw. The problem is that everything is such a disorganized mess from a firmware/documentation/driver perspective that even the service people have trouble finding any information.

It will be very strange to have no physical equipment with an IBM logo on it in a generation, given how completely they used to dominate the computing world.