Arrested IBM Exec Goes MIA On the Web 185
theodp writes "Among those charged in the largest hedge-fund insider trading case in US history was IBM Sr. VP Robert W. Moffat, the heir apparent to IBM CEO Sam Palmisano and the guy behind Big Blue's 'workforce rebalancing' and the sale of IBM's PC unit to Lenovo. IBM's not talking about the incident, but it's interesting that Moffat's bio is MIA at IBM.com ('Biography you tried to access does not exist.'), and his Smarter Planet video can no longer be found ('This video has been removed by the user.') at IBM's YouTube Channel. Do you need approval from the Feds before tidying up after someone who's under investigation? BTW, if stories and comments appearing in the Times Herald-Record and Poughkeepsie Journal are any indication, Moffat may want to avoid a local jury trial. 'I have talked to a few IBMers today, and there seems to be a lot of cheering in the halls of IBM over his arrest,' said Lee Conrad of Alliance@IBM."
Bernie Madoff (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Funny enough (Score:3, Interesting)
I think they are cut from the same cloth, as both the execs I've met and politicians I've met were fevered egos who derive their self-worth from how many subordinates they can collect. They didn't seem overly concerned with objective criteria that indicated success or failure of their ventures, only that everyone was "on board". So doing the job and doing it well often wasn't enough for them; what they really wanted was for you to buy into it heart and soul, a status that many people learned to fake around them. I guess the difference between the execs and the politicians is that the execs are after money, while the politicians are after power (often because they already have money). Otherwise there's a great deal of overlap in both the personality types and the skillsets.
RIP IBM Thinkpad... (Score:3, Interesting)
IBM Thinkpad was by far the best laptop line.. Now, it's basically just another piece of crap laptop. Moffat deserves jail time just for this.. "Crimes against quality."
As an ex-ibm'er from the Hudson Valley... (Score:5, Interesting)
I just want to testify to the anger towards IBM in the Hudson Valley. IBM has moved from being a socially responsible organization towards being a profit driven company. During the process a lot of people have gotten hurt. People who invested their lives working for IBM lost their pensions. They went from being a massive economic presence and benefactor to being a fading sun. If this guy was one of the reasons for the move towards a new cutthroat IBM then good riddance.
Speaking of such.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Cost is part of the calculation, Mr. Moffat noted, but typically not the most important consideration. "People who say this is simply labor arbitrage don't get it," he said. "It's mostly about skills."
You know, I keep hearing that, but I have yet to see any proof. And if you walk into any American CS program, you'll see plenty of American students as well as foreign ones. What I'm saying is that there are plenty of qualified US students coming out of US universities and there are plenty of qualified US citizens to do any IT job. If you find that not to be your experience, I'd like to point out a few issues your organization may have:
In other words, I am very skeptical of anyone who says they can't get qualified people - especially in this economy.
This made my day..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:As an ex-ibm'er from the Hudson Valley... (Score:5, Interesting)
If Watson were still here, the people would be retrained into the next phase/project/product. It would cost money. Having people with such a diverse skill set would be a huge boon to innovation. Watson would see that end game and hold out for it.
People used to know, if you got hired at IBM, you were set for life. This is how Watson attracted the best of the best. Their failure to keep their eye on the ball is a primary contributor to their current position as an irrelevant has-been.
My friend's dad was a typewriter repairman for IBM most of his life. He had MS. When the Selectrics started disappearing in the mid-80's and as the MS started to impair him, they retrained him to work on a bench, repairing PCs. When his MS progressed to the point that the PC repair was too much for him, they gave him an office, and his one responsibility was to file a report on a monthly basis. He was not required to come to work every day. Still received full pay and benefits until he could no longer show up once a month, after he took a fall resulting in injury. He was able to leave with his pension and full benefits.
IBM was more than a corporation, it was an institution. It is extremely sad that this institution no longer exists.
He's not a fucking troll (Score:5, Interesting)
I say this as an American: we've become barbarians. We torture [wikipedia.org] people. We incarcerate more people, both in absolute terms and on a per capita basis, than any other nation in the world, and think it's okay to gang-rape 1% of our population [wikipedia.org]. Our wealth is distributed like that of a banana republic [baselinescenario.com]. We're stupid [4brevard.com], vapid [mtv.com], and like a feral child, we snarl [blogspot.com] and bite [wordpress.com] when someone tries to help us [scienceblogs.com]. America really is the sick man of the world, and personally, I'm about ready to give up and pronounce the disease incurable. We can argue about causes and solutions, but you can't deny that we're in a steep decline. As George Orwell write,
"corporate psychopathy" is so harsh (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's just call it an extreme form of capitalism...
The test will be IBM's Data Retention and Phones (Score:2, Interesting)
IBM may be able to as a legal maneuver remove all the Bios and promos made by this executive. However IBM's data retention and phone system logging is going to be hotly tested. Not much is done in IBM without some tracking system. Most the company phones have logs, all the emails are archived/retention for a few years. I think even the old Sametimes messages were also logged once long ago. It sounds like the US Justice Dept will have wiretaps as the big evidence.
Unfortunately IBM's polices on email retention may put at jeopardy the cache. I think it was 3-5 years worth. IBM learned not to keep a lot of communications after problems with anti-trust lawsuits. Law enforcement may face a mess if they need to go back into the mainframe system because only a few persons know that system outside IBM and internally that generation was being wiped out.
I will laugh out loud if IBM drags its feet in producing all the documents when this hits the courts as this is what it sells to customers at a high premium. IBM's legal legions are 2nd to none for litigation and maneuvering and the do not fear the US gov.
Anyhow it is trival as I think this guy got caught with his hand in the cookie jar when the US gov was fishing for bigger fish such as hedgefund managers who are suspected of funding terrorists. [businessinsider.com]
Time Was... (Score:4, Interesting)
Too bad there's not a company like that anymore...
Re:Speaking of such.... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not just about wages, it's also about labour laws and not having to give benefits like pensions. They would probably even pay uk wages to these people as long as they still get to treat them like shit.
These people aren't dumb, they know they're being taken advantage of. The good ones are looking to move to the UK, Canada, US, etc to get their decent wage and benefits.
Re:He's not a fucking troll (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Speaking of such.... (Score:3, Interesting)
In the past 2 years, my company's bread & butter has been cleaning up GIS (Smallworld, specifically) crap done by an Indian outfit for one of the largest ISPs in the country. They got paid to screw it up & we get paid to fix it. Needless to say, the ISP in question no longer outsources design.
Re:He's not a fucking troll (Score:3, Interesting)
You have a pretty skewed view of the whole situation. For example, Prescott Bush founded the family fortune on working for a company which funneled funds to the S.S. to do Hitler's bidding. And since we're talking about IBM, this is an excellent time to mention that IBM of Germany built and delivered the machines to manage the concentration camps, and actually printed the punch cards as well [villagevoice.com], but does their level best to deny their part in history [scrapbookpages.com]. Nonetheless, many [jewishvirtuallibrary.org] racial groups have reason to recall. No, I don't have any Obama hating to do today, don't worry... But to have the head of a dynasty founded by a known Nazi collaborator [guardian.co.uk] head the CIA, then become president, then get his son into the office... Well, it should put this whole conversation into perspective.
Hot diggity DAMN I love the internet. It makes it so easy to cite your sources. If articles like these start dropping off these here internets, you'll know to run and not look back.
Re:RIP IBM Thinkpad... (Score:3, Interesting)
It is really quite straight forward. When Lenovo purchased bought the thinkpad unit, they naturally enough in business terms, dumped that purchase price into that units debt structure. In order to start paying off that debt, which basically adds say around 5 to 10 percent (depending upon how quickly they want to reduce that debt) to every notebook sold. They simple cut corners and hope to trade on the prior reputation of quality, basically lie about the current quality and pretend it was the same as before in order to sustain higher profit margins. This is done for as long as possible, until sales start to suffer and then they either return to a higher quality to rebuild the image or drop the price.
Typical lie, cheat and steal, modern business marketing and sales tactics. Quality it doesn't have to be there as long as they can spend enough of PR=B$ marketing to convince you it is there when it is not.
Re:"Workforce rebalance" (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:As an ex-ibm'er from the Hudson Valley... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hmmmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
One does wonder when the executive culture and financial media routinely heap praise on executives who can make the "hard decisions" where "hard decision" is defined as one that hurts people in favor of profits and never means the decision to do the right thing for people in spite of the short term costs to the company. The latter decision seems to actually be the harder one since so few ever actually take that path.
that story seems so quaint now, doesn't it? (Score:1, Interesting)
and it only goes back to the mid 80's. I thought the 1st ever IBM layoff happened around that time, but according to google it was Feb 1993. It was pretty much all downhill from there. For IBM and the rest of corporate america, who read IBM's decision as an "OK" to balance economic inequities, as well as bad mgmt decisions, on the backs of "regular" employees.