Thread by @QuinnyPig

Since their new CEO came from Cloud, guess what my gift in this thread is to @ibmcloud?

screenshots.duckbillgroup.com/pDxK4g3LCS1W

There are several "IBM Cloud" pages and they don't necessarily look like they're all talking about the same thing.

This is uh... going to be interesting.

I'll click the Google Ad under the naive theory that there's no possible way they'd be promoting the old version via paid marketing.

screenshots.duckbillgroup.com/girqd6PMpNaI

Of *course* the "choose your country" is alphabetically sorted / not autodetected.

And of course the "blow up my shit with sales emails and phone calls" boxes are checked by default.

Christ on a cross.

What the shit is this on the left side of the screen?

*tilts monitor 90 degrees*

After logging in I'm greeted with a crapton of privacy notices, last updated in May of 2018. I guess the CCPA comes late to @ibmcloud?

@IBMcloud And I'm logged in and--oh dear.

Maintenance tomorrow for a k8s upgrade. Also, 3 of the 4 regions are currently experiencing issues. I think the "Create Resource" in the top right is what comes next, but I had to hunt to find it.

@IBMcloud Whoever designed this needs to be put on a PIP. Services are sorted alphabetically. There's no guided onboarding. "Want to spin up a VM / storage bucket / toilet in which to drown yourself? Start here!" is always useful. "Lite" and "free" are apparently two different things.

@IBMcloud Before removing the filter, my two compute options are "container registry" and "Cloud Foundry." Either IBM or I have no clue what a Cloud Foundry is; it could really go either way.

@IBMcloud I want to spin up a Linux box to test a few things out. That rules out WebSphere and HPCaaS, and leaves a four option Choose My Own Adventure book wherein all of the choices are confusing and bad.

@IBMcloud Okay, Internet. We pause here for ten minutes to let you tell me which to do.

@IBMcloud You have chosen the option that doesn't have a 3-4 hour provisioning lag. Excellent! Virtual server it is. Oh my god this configurator is nuts.

@IBMcloud * Price goes from 4¢ an hour to 10¢ an hour if I pick RHEL.
* "100mbps but it's rate limited" is honest.
* "Here are popular profiles" is excellent. More of this please @ibmcloud.
* I pick Seattle to warn the instance of what's coming.

@IBMcloud "We're unable to find that billing address!" then correcting it with the extended ZIP is... particular. Pro Marketing Tip: don't correct your customers during onboarding about shit that truly does not matter. It riles some of us.

@IBMcloud "Account upgrade now in progress! You'll have $200 in credits, but they expire in 30 days." That seems... frugal.

Time to hurry up and wait!

@IBMcloud That was quick, but now I lost what I'd selected. A flash of rage consumes me, and I name the instance and domain in a fit of pique.

@IBMcloud "Enabling SSH requires a device restart." Oh my sweet feathery Jesus.

And what the crap is this?!

@IBMcloud Docs say: "To create a virtual server instance, you must have an SSH key uploaded and available so that you can connect to your instance after it's provisioned."

Well I didn't when I spun this up and it never stopped me. Even the docs team doesn't use the service!

@IBMcloud Oh my god they generate a root password and you just... use that to SSH in as root. It's an eight character alphanumeric and now I'm screaming.

@IBMcloud You need to activate a specific security group to allow outbound traffic. That caught me by surprise a smidgen.

I've disabled password SSH; to be clear that was hanging out on the internet, no VPN required.

@IBMcloud The documentation around all of this speaks to no actual use cases; it's written in a vaguely academic style by someone working from the design spec instead of "watching an actual customer use the thing."

@IBMcloud Their docs consistently veer off into "here's what SSH is and how it works. These files govern the daemon's behavior" and I'm just wondering who the hell the target audience for this is.

@IBMcloud There's an "install firewall" link in the dashboard. I click it and am positive it's not saying what I think it's saying. Right?

@IBMcloud The "Order Object Storage" button leads to the answer to "what if @awscloud billing was somehow worse." This is groundbreaking research!

@IBMcloud @awscloud Another decision point for you, internet!

Do I tell @ibmcloud how to fix their technology, or how to fix their cloud business?

@IBMcloud @awscloud Cloud Business it is! Excellent choice; despite acquiring some of the best technologists in the world in the form of RedHat, and having some of the best engineers on the planet for the past century, IBM clearly listens to none of them when it comes to technology.

Their cloud offering is, to be blunt, dogshit. And there's no clear path forward for it to be anything other than a source of derision and mockery. @ibmcloud feels almost wholly like "spin up a VPC / bare metal server like the olden days" that completely missed the cloud boat.

"So the future of our company is OpenShift!" Yes except absolutely not; imagine I start a company tomorrow in San Francisco that will grow to be a S&P500 component. At what point will I become an OpenShift customer. I will obviously never become one, so it's the wrong product.

"Not every company is a SF startup!" No, but their technology journeys will look a lot like them someday. You can sell legacy stuff for a long time, but you're IBM and thus know that already. The question is "how do you forestall the decline?"

You need something that's the future, not the past. That's not RedHat, but if you can hurl $34 billion at them you can probably hurl way less at skunkworks projects. You could be the Vision Fund without the bonesaw investors and complete lack of adult supervision!

While you're waiting for that to bear fruit, lean into the current state of affairs with self-aware marketing campaigns. Picture an airport ad!

"Choose IBM Cloud. Because when it comes to war crimes, this isn't our first rodeo."

(To be very very clear I'm not trying to crap on individual employees. This a failure of @ibm's executive leadership. They had all the money, talent, and time they needed to fix this situation long before now and chose not to.)

@IBM "Oh, Corey just started this thread to shit on IBM." Not true. I did one yesterday for @gcpcloud and expected to shit all over them, but ended up adoring the experience and talking about it!

The user experience says your cloud offering has utterly failed. What do you do now?

@IBM @GCPcloud I mean, take a look at your cloud landing page! This isn't your product offering, it's the goddamned @ibmcloud org chart!

@IBM @GCPcloud @IBMcloud Nobody uses compute without network and storage. Dev Tools need to be integrated into the whole experience. Security should be too, but you need to fix yours first because honestly: damn.

You clearly have no idea who your customer is, what your customer wants, or what their journey looks like once they arrive on your doorstep.

And now, to finish up this thread because I couldn't make this up:

Okay, while having to talk to a human at all was annoying, the support experience was aces: