OSNews

IBM is truly international, with operations in 170 countries worldwide. 45% of revenues are from the U.S., while other countries provide 65%.

So IBM has a revenue of 110% :p.

IBM will hopefully produce stable PRAM ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_memory ), which could be mass produced.

Google, Yahoo, and other like Facebook are not Tech Companies. They use tech products (Software, Servers, Networking and Chip based products)but dont make a living at it. No, they sell advertising and pump alot of stuff to attract eyeballs to drive higher ad revenues.

As usual... All depends how you want to gamble. If you want to be reasonably sure to make some money, but want to be reasonably sure to not lose too much, then you go for IBM and Amazon, outside of economical crisis, you will get a steady increase, and perceive a yearly dividend. But then frankly, you will be better by buying from an investment fund which will have the capacity to be diversified.

If you want to take a high risk, and accept a high chance of lost, then you can go for the small startup (BMC), the company that might be recovered (Cisco) or the one that might be bought (Yahoo).

At the end, the real question is always how much you want to risk your money, and how badly you want to make a lot of money.

Yahoo- agree that this is a company in trouble. Lots of employees, and lots will be let go soon. Why would anyone buy them other than for their user base? If it weren't for the ATT-Yahoo deal they'd already be history.

IBM- interesting view, there. Never realized they've been doing so well, comparatively.

Cisco- wish you had more details on their strategy, that's going to mean more for their future than the financials you cite.

BMC- surprised they're still around! Keep on fightin', BMC dudes.

I usually compare Cisco with the servers division from HP. HP servers are the best I have worked with, but are more expensive and so we are starting to buy from their competitors, that have also increased their quality. Cisco is facing great competition from the likes of Juniper or A10: they're way cheaper and the products are not bad at all.

Though I don't always agree with what you write (I recall taking great exception to a recent submission of yours...) I'd just like to say that I appreciate the time and effort that go into your contributions and that I enjoy reading them.

Thank you!

I try not to use the word hate too much, but Cisco really annoys me more than any other tech company. Their products are expensive and don't play well with solutions from other companies.

Firstly BMC.. We use a number of their products (the bladelogic stuff mainly) in our organisation. There are a number of major hurdles that I see in that suite of products. 1) Overly complex, 2) Slow release cycles don't keep up with vendor versions (possibly because of pt 1. 3) Difficulty in extending the functionality with a big question mark over cost effectiveness and the ability for those addon's/expansions to continue working cross version (i.e. if you upgrade your bmc tools do your api's remain static, and if they do does your software still work). This is particularly evident in the work flow stuff. I wish them the best of luck, I know in my future I wouldn't in good conscious recommend them to anyone wanting an agile organisation despite what their marketing material says.

Cisco.. by far the leader in routers and switches in terms of sales volumes.. I feel that while the ASR products have taken some of the thunder from Juniper it's still a me too platform. It's playing catch up on the features that Juniper have had for some time. While it is a good first effort it's a huge difference between the traditional IOS and that's a big training difference.. not as much as going from IOS->JunOS but it's still a jump. On the security front it's playing catchup in a big way.. I am in the process of doing a major product comparison between a 7 different vendors security products.. so far there is nothing except price that would keep us using cisco and it's just not good enough in a compliance centric security world that we live in.. Companies like Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks have nailed the solutions pretty well.. where is cisco in that area? their products are a mish mash with what appears to be no global view of how they are all meant to fit together. This is a topic I feel very strongly about.. we use Cisco today for security, but looking at what else is on the market it's almost impossible to justify moving forward. Ironically we use Juniper today and are moving to Cisco for future core projects.. win/lose.

IBM... We are a HP shop, but I have come from organisations who are multi-vendor and HP x86 was the king of the hill until the newer generation of x series arrived.. the 3550 etc which closed the lead that HP had and then over took it.. We had HP come out and give us a presentation on their G8 product yesterday, some of the features in there have been in the IBM products for years.. but then there are some innovations on the HP front and the G8 has the potential to be a really great product.. however the big question is have they fixed the reliability problems we have on the G7? (40% increase in failures when compared to the G6 on an estate of ~3500 servers). IBM are still innovating and there are some interesting things, the big challenge that IBM are going to have is on the software side.. some of their software suites are so overly complex they are very difficult to maintain and deploy and often need heavy customizations to work properly.. that means how do they get upgraded? the answer is professional services.. good for IBMs bottom line but bad for customer satisfaction if your a mid tier business... I think IBM has the best potential out of Dell/HP into the future.. and I can't see Sun.. oops I mean Oracle doing anything positive.. Larry thinks that 99% margins in x86 are normal.. pfff..

Is a jungle inside. Sure, it's a pun, but it's also 100% true! There's more than one reason they're hiring so many people, and it's not just for growth: Amazon swallows people and spits them out with how things are done in so many of their groups/departments. I'm sure there are some groups that use a good process and proper environments for QA and developers, but I can absolutely guarantee you based on first-hand experience working under their roof that some of what they do would make you cringe when it comes to process and environments. During the time I worked there in one group (just short of 9 months) the turnover was higher than the time I spent years ago as a pizza delivery driver in a chain pizza restaurant, and understandably so.

Amazon is the 8 billion pound gorilla in their space in many things: what they need to worry about long-term is competitors that execute better when it comes to quality and reliability of their systems, and attracting a large enough customer base (I'm not talking individuals buying stuff from them, but merchants, for the most part). Amazon, I feel, may allow themselves to grow too complacent in this regard, precisely for the same reason Microsoft (I've worked under their roof, too) allowed Windows quality to become a bad joke amongst many in the past: they had the dominant position, and didn't feel threatened enough to do a better job, since they didn't have much reason to fear customers going to someone else.