Thread by @QuinnyPig

Today was apparently the @ibm earnings call. Let's see what they had to say...

Highlights:
* Arvind Krishna remains CEO and not fired in favor of Jim Whitehurst yet.
* COVID19 gets blamed for everything bad, suspiciously absent when talking about the good parts.
* They announced a 10 year services deal with Banco Sabadell, which is very IBM of them.

"I will be present on earnings calls!" commits their interim CEO / Jim Whitehurst's chair warmer.

@ibmcloud (the segment that includes Red Hat and a bunch of other things) grew 7%, which is "we forgot to turn some things off" growth territory.

"Our financial clients were able to scale up to support high trade volumes!" @ibm excitedly states, trumpeting one of the Public Cloud talking points from 2008.

"We have no clue what the markets are doing, so we're going to withdraw our guidance for the rest of 2020." This is the smart call by @ibm, though some analysts may whine and cry about it making their jobs harder.

"We expect less impact to our Z systems and storage businesses due to the fact that those deals are much longer term." I can't really snark on that more effectively than they just did.

And now, Q&A.

1. "We updated our chart format." Analysts crap themselves.
2. "As always, please refrain from multi-part questions." HAHAHA good luck.

Evercore analyst starts: "You talked about areas you want to focus on. How do you view the investment the company needs to do, and how do you go about that organically? And then on the flip side--" BZZZT. That's a multipart question.

The question is good, though. If you want to be serious about cloud, you need to be investing billions in capital expenditures about five years ago. To that end, Alibaba just put $28 billion into their cloud, so 2025 is heating up!

The @ibm CFO just said "Hybrid cloud data AI" in a sentence and was apparently serious. I guess they've given up on serverless blockchain.

Next @bankofamerica asks a single question. Just kidding, those weasels snuck a second question in too, proving that "following instructions" isn't required to work there.

Now talking about their GTM strategy of "spinning demos up in public clouds for customers to play with."

It's a neat problem; @ibm has long depended upon face to face meetings to close enterprise deals.

"@ibm has always been focused on large enterprises, not consumer / SMB."

"How do you envision the offering portfolio changing two years from now" asks an analyst who didn't realize that "two years" was a single IBM sprint cycle.

"We (@ibm) run our clients' mission critical workloads, not the first things they'll turn off so we aren't seeing subscription revenue meaningfully impacted yet." JESUS.

Now trying to justify "clients accelerating their journeys to cloud" as some kind of master strategy that explains overpaying for RedHat. "Cognitive / AI services is where we got hit" with respect to revenue.

Oh dear.

And the last question I'll stick around for since there's nothing about @ibm that justifies going over an hour:

@morganstanley: "What metrics would you like us to measure you on for the next couple of years?"

"Gross tonnage of our computers" would be the honest answer.

"Other than revenue or pure financial metrics, the number of clients engaged on Hybrid Cloud projects." Credit where due, hybrid is probably @IBM's only real shot at relevance. It's the right answer.

AND THAT CONCLUDES THIS CALL FROM MY PERSPECTIVE.