I’ve been hearing since before Christmas about Project Chrome, the code name for what has been touted to me as the biggest reorganization in IBM history. Well, Project Chrome is finally upon us, triggered I suppose by this week’s announcement of an 11th consecutive quarter of declining revenue for IBM. Project Chrome is bad news, not good. Customers and employees alike should expect the worst.
“IBM is now hours away from Dow infamy,” said Andrew Ross Sorkin on NBC Squawk Box this morning. “IBM is on track for the second consecutive year as the very worst performer in the Dow Jones Industrial Index for the second year in a row. That’s the first time that has happened since 1995.” In 2014, IBM lost 15 percent of its market cap. Despite having the largest stock of patents in a booming IT sector, IBM lost even more value than ExxonMobil [XOM] which is having to cope with collapsing oil prices.
A new way of building computer chips is taking shape that involves synthesizing molecules so that they automatically assemble into complex structures—which then serve as templates for etching nanoscale circuitry into silicon. The approach could let the computer industry continue to shrink electronics beyond the resolution of existing manufacturing machinery. IBM researchers have been the first to make speedy 3-D transistors using this new method.
Most big corporations follow global development trends. Where there is economic growth, there is opportunity, and the companies that can predict where growth will take place are better positioned to take advantage of it. That is the reactive approach to economic development.
As a research chemist at an IBM laboratory, Jeannette M. Garcia spends her days mixing and heating chemicals in pursuit of stronger and more easily recyclable plastics. Recently she followed a simple formula that required mixing three components in a beaker. Somehow she missed a step, leaving out a chemical. She returned to find her beaker filled with a hard white plastic that had even frozen the stirrer.
Dr. Garcia tried grinding the mystery material, to no avail. Then she took a hammer to the beaker to free it.
More early-stage companies are signing up for IBM’s fancy Watson supercomputing technology for processing lots of text and then making decisions on the fly.
But they’re not rolling in big racks full of servers and hard disk drives to do this. They’re tapping into Watson-as-a-Service.
On Friday, IBM named three new partners in its burgeoning Watson initiative, following its decision to make Watson available as a managed service.
The silicon chip has a new challenger. An IBM lab in New york has built a rudimentary semiconductor chip with circuits made from graphene, a crystalline version of carbon that takes on a honeycomb lattice shape on an atomic scale.
IBM ha lanzado su ya tradicional Five to Five, las cinco predicciones que ocurrirán en nuestro entorno en los próximos cinco años, es decir hasta 2018. Si el pasado año pronosticaba ordenadores capaces de oír y oler y papilas gustativas digitales, para los cinco años pronostica que no serán los estudiantes lo que aprendan en las aulas sino las aulas las que aprenderán de los estudiantes para aplicar la enseñanza a medida en cada momento.
