Here it is, as irresistible as a prime time car chase that ends with a celebrity stuck in a well is to CNN:
Last year, it [IBM] invested nearly $1 billion to leverage the Cloud Foundry platform to develop the Bluemix platform-as-a-service as an implementation of its Open Cloud Architecture.”
As a farewell (with apologies) to David Letterman, listicle popularizer [1]:
Top Ten Reactions to Latest IBM “Billion Dollar” Inanity
10. They must not be very serious if this project doesn’t merit a full billion dollars.
9. Sheer inefficiency isn’t a particularly strong value proposition.
8. How does one spend “nearly” a billion to stand up software someone else built? [2]
7. Maybe they really do have as many lawyers and standards people as I joke about.
6. In seven plus years, Pivotal/VMware haven’t spent that much on Cloud Foundry.
5. That is a lot of money to spend and still have no customers to show for it.
4. A bottle of champagne to the reporter who calls them on this clichéd playbook.
3. Could aspiring Apple reseller IBM tie their shoes for less than a billion dollars?
2. Needless to say, there is a drinking game here.
1. IBM: “It’s a Billion Mister – what was the question?”
Notes
[1] For the record, my favorite Top Ten List was Top Ten Pravda Headlines After Chernobyl, including such gems as “Lead Hats: Sturdy and Sensible” and “Ukrainians Get Free Truck Rides”.
[2] Is the sheer scale of the investment a SoftLayer problem? An IBM Global Services problem? If the number isn’t the result of hopelessly uncompetitive IBM dependencies, how could you possibly spend this much?