IBM's Desperate Plea to Be Seen for Who They Are Now
Description
A screenshot of a tweet from the official 'IBM Jobs' Twitter account (@IBMJobsGlobal), dated January 29, 2019. The tweet uses a dramatic formatting for emphasis, starting with 'We' followed by the word 'really' repeated fifteen times, each on its own line. The message concludes with: 'need you to know we don't make PCs anymore. Yes, really. It's been a while.' This post is a humorous and exasperated public service announcement. The humor stems from the corporate account's desperate tone, breaking from its typical professional voice to address a persistent public misconception. For experienced tech professionals, this is a relatable nod to tech history, as IBM sold its personal computer division, including the iconic ThinkPad line, to Lenovo back in 2005. The meme highlights the incredible inertia of brand identity and how long it takes for public perception to catch up with a company's strategic pivots
Comments
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Some say the longest TTL in existence isn't in a DNS record, but in the public's cache of the fact that 'IBM makes PCs'
IBM’s 20-“really” tweet about quitting the PC biz feels like my sprint demo: “We’ve totally, really, absolutely sunset the ’99 monolith”… right up until the shiny new microservice quietly shells out to its ancient COBOL buddy
IBM explaining they don't make PCs anymore with the same energy as explaining to your PM that no, adding blockchain won't fix the legacy COBOL system that's been running since 1982
IBM deprecated PCs in 2005, but like every deprecated API, clients keep calling it 14 years later and the maintainers are reduced to shouting in the release notes
IBM's tweet perfectly captures the enterprise pivot paradox: they sold their PC division to Lenovo in 2005, yet 14 years later still need to remind people with emphatic repetition. It's the corporate equivalent of a senior architect explaining to stakeholders that yes, we really did deprecate that monolithic system three migrations ago, but somehow everyone still thinks we're maintaining COBOL on AS/400s. The gap between a company's actual technology stack and public perception is measured in decades, not sprints
IBM buffering 'no' at mainframe scale before flushing the legacy PC feature - classic enterprise revert commit
Brand perception is just eventual consistency - IBM sold PCs in 2005, but the human cache-invalidation TTL seems infinite, hence the ‘really’ retry loop
Hardest prod problem isn’t consensus - it’s invalidating the “IBM PC” key in the world’s cache; TTL looks infinite, so marketing’s using exponential backoff with really^N