Mission: cook up some stats defining you as a leader
by Volker Weber
That was easy. Next mission: find people on the street who would name IBM as a leader in smartphones.
Comments
Some get him to name the software. That 80% stat is misleading.
That's not only true for smartphones ... IBM's R&D has a lot of output that seems rather unrelated to IBM's core business but makes them (us ;-)) to a leader in a lot of those "unrelated" areas. This 6B $ R6D budget and patent leader thing has to be good for something.
A few months ago I had a briefing in Almaden Lab - not only that the location is awesome but what they are doing and achieving just blows your mind.
Would you name IBM as leading in salt water destillation or lithium battery development or solar cells?
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/st/smarter_planet/water_membranes/
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/st/smarter_planet/battery/
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/st/smarter_planet/photovoltaics/
What does 'software generated by IBM development products' mean? So everything I develop using Eclipse can be attributed to IBM? I don't think this leads to "leader in smartphones" - maybe to leader in IDEs. (I love Eclipse for Java development - that doesn't mean IBM is such a great android development company)
It does not mean anything besides that they could not come up with any meaningful numbers to back up their claim.
Let's be clear about what these claims are. The whole point is to show that IBM is BEHIND many of the market's most important technologies. I don't think anyone claimed "IBM is a leader in smartphones". Go read the releases.
Ed, which development products, and how do you count smartphones? Marketshare in units, in revenue, models, etc. contain software, does that mean the boot loader? Or the whole operating system, one app, or the prompt that asks for the PIN?
unless I'm mistaken, IBM is behind a lot of the chipsets, cmos, firmware, and so on. Low level stuff.
