IBM’s great disappearing trick
IBM is about to pull off the greatest magic trick in history. The company is about to make +300K employees disappear. A tech-first giant trying to swim in a people-first ocean, IBM has in recent years put on the design life jacket hoping it would save the company from drowning into IT history. It’s not working and I’ll tell you (I mean you IBM) why.
This morning, Moshe Weiss of IBM posted this story.
What does this story have to do with IBM’s demise you may ask? Well, I’m glad you asked because I’ve had enough of IBM’s design pandering. So, stand back, this sh*t is about to hit the fan.
Let’s ignore for a minute the fact that when you have to call your UI ‘cool’ and your UX ‘innovative’ you’re in trouble (it’s quite sad actually). What upsets me is the last sentence:
“Over 15 patents (!!) around this User Experience.”
Really? 15 patents? With 2 exclamation marks? Great. Good for you. How does this help us (and by ‘us’ I mean society as whole) in any way? You’re f**king taunting us. Like the frenchmen taunting King Arthur in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, what IBM is really saying is: “Look at this cool (!!) and innovative (!!) thing we’ve built, and btw, you can’t have it because we’ve patented the sh*t out of it.” Now, I know IBM is a commercial company and not a non-profit and it needs patents to make money. But waving the exact number of patents in our face is a sign of IBM’s gross misunderstanding of the era the rest of us are living in (you don’t see Google listing the number of patents that went into its search algorithm, do you?). In other words, if you’re going to talk about User Interface and User Experience, tell us something that users care about, something that’s going to make their lives better, something that’s going to empower them as opposed to padding IBM’s over inflated patent portfolio.
I left IBM Research in 2013 after nearly three frustrating years. I was trained as an architect (the building kind) and made a 90 degree turn into tech during my graduate career at MIT. At IBM Research, I was a member of the Social Technologies group and worked developing applications for crowdsourcing games in the enterprise. The only designer in an IT company, I stood out like a sore thumb. After three years of treading water, I decided to leave. About the time I was preparing to leave, Ginni Rometty stepped in to take Sam Palmisano’s place as CEO of IBM. One of the things I still remember from those days was Ginni’s opening address to the employees. Full of inspiration, Ginni recalled how she felt holding an iPad she had bought as a Christmas gift for her grandchildren. She talked about how intuitive the iPad was…so simple that even her young grandchildren could operate it. She used this story to deliver the message that there’s no reason why IBM software shouldn’t feel as simple and intuitive to its users as the iPad. My reaction to her story was “Yes! It’s about time. Finally, someone high up in the company cares about design.”
In March of 2014, IBM announced it’s going to invest $100 million in design and hire 1000 new designers, open 10 new Interaction Experience labs around the world, and more (source).
Later in July that year, IBM made a big announcement about a newly formed partnership with Apple to transform enterprise mobility (source).
In the meantime, the company launched the IBM Design website with the mandatory look-n-feel of a design website, but leaving intact the dry corporate header and footer. Quick aside: The website says “Introducing IBM Design Thinking” which is a little IP naming trick I learned during my time at IBM. If you need to name a product but the name already exists or is widely popular (like Design Thinking, originally coined and popularized by IDEO) just stick IBM in front of it and you’re good to go.
In 2016, IBM went on a shopping spree acquiring three (!!) digital design agencies including exc.io. Asked about the flurry of deals, European unit chief Matthew Candy said IBM’s been on a “journey” to build out its own 25 design studios organically, but wanted the chance to grow even faster through acquisition. “Our simple orders are growth, and these announcements are making sure to continue to drive it,” Candy says (source).
Dear IBM, despite (or maybe in spite) of the acquisitions, the partnerships, the hires, and promises, you can’t buy design. Instead, you have to buy into design. You have to put aside the tech, the patents, the blue LED illuminated black server racks, the buzzwords (Cognitive Computing?), and the Asimov inspired visions (a supercomputer that starts as a doctor and ends up a chef)…and focus on people. If there’s one thing designers are good at is understanding people. That’s what you need. Forget about the pop colors, reinventing design thinking guidelines, or creating ‘cool’ UI and ‘innovative’ UX (whatever that means). Discover what every startup today knows — it’s about people and NOT the ones who work for you. Those people that you build products for don’t care about your patents. They don’t care about your Cognitive Computing abilities. They care about getting stuff done. They care about impact. They want to know how is the thing you’re trying to sell them today is going to make them better tomorrow.
Pablo Picasso said:
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”
What is your gift IBM?…and will you patent it or give it away?
