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- The Decline and Fall of IBM by Robert X. Cringley is an interesting read. Some of Alan Kay's writings give an indication of how Xerox Parc fell. Bell Labs is an outlier in that it was the AT&T break-up that ended up starving it of funds. You might also want to read some of Steve Blank's blog entries - his site is very well organised so it is easy to find his version of events.
Since your question specifically mentions engineering teams, the changes there come after PHBs start issuing Dunning-Kruger Syndrome based edicts. Engineers at first push back and when that fails, the ones who can find new jobs leave in droves. Eventually the best engineers are gone and only the less talented ones (generally more junior due to lack of of experience) remain which in turn leads to a dual problem of them not knowing enough to push back and implementing solutions poorly partly due to lack of ability and also partly due to lack of motivation to do the right thing. While that is going on, the managers get increasingly antsy and demanding, issuing ever more bad decisions. It really becomes a downward death spiral.
As an aside, I worked with DEC and watched (from the side-lines) as it was acquired by Compaq and then the merger with HP. The management incompetence was unbelievable and the technical teams' morale sank like a lead balloon.
- The only machine working over at Watson is the PR machine.
It's astonishing how much IBM has spent to achieve so little. Per the Jefferies report, IBM spent $15 billion in Cognitive from 2010 to 2015, not including an additional $5 billion in data acquisitions. Even if Cognitive weren't a marketing buzzword invented by IBM to describe if-then statements, that would still be deeply embarrassing. (You could probably double the number of startups funded in Silicon Valley in a year with $20 billion dollars, and I'll bet you'd get much higher returns.)
When you look at the main open-source AI frameworks, none of them were created by IBM, because IBM was incapable of building them. There are individual startups that have done more in AI, using far fewer resources.
And the real shame is that IBM is convincing rubes to buy their cognitive trash, and the rubes are doing it. And when the rubes' bosses realize that the rubes blew the AI budget and the "AI" delivered nothing, those rubes are getting canned. You can get fired for buying IBM. I've seen it.
There's a Madoff-like quality to IBM's Watson sales strategy. The more they fail, the wider they circle to depend on dumber and dumber money from abroad. They're going after rural Scandinavia. They're selling to 3rd-tier cities in China. Just imagining targeting a buyer with the sophistication of the mayor of Mobile, Alabama. That's where IBM Watson is selling strong.
IBM has been poisoning the well in the AI industry for years, teaching customers to be gun-shy and scared of an important technology, just because they blew their money on a dog to begin with. I don't believe an AI winter will come, but if it did, IBM would be the main culprit.
Even if Watson's many mysterious technologies worked, they would still have a lame business model, because most of AI, and the best of AI tooling, is open source. IBM's trying to sell a secret sauce, even as it declines to participate in competitions that would should how Watson stacks up against other tech. Oren Etzioni has been calling them out for years. [1,2,3]
Anyone wondering how IBM came to this sorry pass should read Robert Cringely's "The Decline and Fall of IBM." It's a company run by a clueless management class, who probably believe the smoke they're blowing up everyone else's ass. That's the scary part: The C-suite at IBM actually bought that hype about Watson, until they started to see the numbers, and the numbers sucked. That's why they don't break them out in the quarterly earnings reports. IBM is not signing up the Watson partners it thought it would. [0]
Watson makes claims to solve everything. But when you dig in with the sales people, the only success story they cite is Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK). It's suspicious, considering how many other organizations they must have worked with. H&R block is bragging about Watson technology, too, but that's just because they think the marketing gimmick will work for them as well as it's worked for IBM.
The real problem in a situation like this is that very few people have an incentive to get the truth out. IBM doesn't want its stock price to dive. And all the customers are mortified that they failed and wasted their money. And they probably had to sign some non-disparagement clause to boot.
[0] http://www.cringely.com/2016/09/07/carrie-underwoods-america...
[1,2,3] https://twitter.com/etzioni/status/654486809825570817
- Worth noting there is also 'The Decline and Fall of IBM' by Cringely (2014) : https://www.cringely.com/2014/06/04/decline-fall-ibm/
- Related reading is Cringely’s long history of writing about IBM
Blog: https://www.cringely.com/tag/ibm/
The Decline and Fall of IBM https://www.amazon.com/Decline-Fall-IBM-American-Icon/dp/099...
