Of course they have, they kill off a "name/service" every year and try and sucker customers into thinking they are selling some new and exciting product, all the while selling the same old pig.
IBM kills Bluemix, a year after killing SoftLayer
IBM has re-named its cloud. Again. The last change of stationery was on October 25th, 2016, when IBM decided to replace the “SoftLayer" name and replace it with Bluemix. On Tuesday this week the company changed it again, announcing that “Bluemix is now IBM Cloud”. The company's rationale is that “we are merging the Bluemix …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 6th February 2018 15:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
First time I came across it, was called Lotus Sametime, then IBM Lotus Sametime and then IBM Sametime.
Inside IBM we usually referred to it as "SomeTime". Last I heard the entire company's ST infrastructure was running on a PC350 somewhere. And since they couldn't stabilize the infrastructure, they banned all 3rd-party clients.
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Thursday 2nd November 2017 14:14 GMT cintra
Marketing genius
Plenty more examples of that.
Such as the ThinkPad "Butterfly" - a superb way to reference the laptop's unique ability to unfold its keyboard like the wings of a newly-born butterfly as it viewed the dawn for the very first time.
Or the 701C, to give it its official IBM name.
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Thursday 2nd November 2017 11:30 GMT Doctor Huh?
Innovative!!
The usual metaphor for this sort of thing is "shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic," however I feel IBM has innovated in this area. Re-naming and re-branding every few months seems like less effort than moving physical chairs. I'd love to come up with a suitable Titanic-based metaphor, but I think "re-branding the IBM Cloud" will become the metaphor everyone uses in the future for a futile, lackluster effort that ultimately promises no significant change.
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Thursday 2nd November 2017 17:41 GMT chrismevans
Re: shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic
The Spectrum branding was just plain stupid. The names don't 100% reflect what the products were. Whereas XIV, SVC, TSM, etc were names customers were familiar with. I have to look every time to work out what the Spectrum XXX products are.
When you feel a need to rebrand a set of disparate products to make them look like a strategy, then you've lost the plot.
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Thursday 2nd November 2017 21:56 GMT JohnMartin
Sphincter Storage Logo
Hahahahaha - Thank you for making laugh while reading a dry article on rebranding the cloud (hmm can't think of any other time something cloud related has been rebranded)
There's so much that can be done with Sphincter Storage ... I wonder if it's time for another simplistic.io
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Thursday 2nd November 2017 14:18 GMT JMiles
All IBM lacks really is a single vision. They need a Bezos, Nadella or Benioff that can actually lead a coherent vision.
Not saying that any of these names are necessarily role models but at least they actually know how to do something other than accounting and marketing gimmicks. When one of those three have something to say many people listen; when was the last time anyone cared what an IBM CEO had to say?
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Thursday 2nd November 2017 23:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
Agreed
Agreed. Someone who can drive a coherent strategy, stop marketing doing silly things like renaming products every year or so, put customers first. Probably won't be too long until a new CEO anyhow.
re: naming of products. It's not just IBM. All vendors rename their products every so often. Microsoft, VMware, Dell, Oracle. It's when silly marketing folks need something to do.
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