IBM's reputation at risk in wake of census bungle
A few years ago I worked on a project where my company was contracted to build a small piece of a much larger system by IBM. IBM was managing many different contractors. We needed a way to &quot;securely&quot; show a picture, aka not using the pre-installed image showing app. So IBM spent tens of thousands of dollars to build a new Android app that displayed a picture passed to it via an intent. I told our product guy that I could build it in an hour for free, but he said it wasn&#x27;t our problem. In our twice-weekly status calls, we would ask about when the &quot;image showing app&quot; would arrive, and we heard all about the minutiae of building that app, from getting a PM, to finding a partner in India, to QA, to issues with the app, back to the contractor, and finally to us, where it was buggy as hell and never worked right. Completely mind boggling, and very enlightening about how IBM (and I&#x27;m sure other big vendors) operate.