I worked on one of the projects that C3 was involved in as a GE employee and agree completely with Seibel's assessment.

Some things I observed:

#1 I watched a top software development company that was doing a great job get fired because they told GE that a desired deadline was impossible. One of the reasons the non-technical manager who fired them gave for the termination was that he didn't feel like they wrote enough lines of code.

#2 A very corporate culture. Developers could not wear jeans in the office. You needed come to work in business casual or dressier attire. And this was one of the innovation centers.

#3 A "corporate" rollout of TDD where a bunch of enterprise developers who hated TDD were given TDD training and then had no requirement to use it for 6 months....plus none of the other practices that go with it. In the end most devs never adopted the practice. (I am a TDD advocate and trust me I tired to get them to use a different approach but it was like talking to a wall)

#4 Crazy bureaucracy to get anything done. Servers need to be in a private double secure cloud (for non production non sensitive components) and developers worked for over a year with out any actual servers to run code on, and were not allowed to stand up servers under you desk as a stop gap due to corporate security. It would even take weeks to even get basics like office supplies that had to go through a special workflow.

#5 During this period of no servers, I was in charge of getting the CI infrastructure set up. One time I had a six sigma black belt ask me the status of the project. When I told him it was on hold due to lack of infrastructure he said "Lack of servers is no reason for not being able to roll out CI in our organization"

#6 Lots of training for things not needed for your job. Six Sigma (the only useful thing was lean which could have been taught in a quarter of the time). There was a good 20-40 hours of mandatory training per year (at least) for things relating to corporate compliance, safety etc., but not things relating to your job.

#7 For one project the use of Javascript was prohibited in favor of using a server side technology that generates it because the enterprise architect thought it would not be realistic to expect Java developers to learn or be able to also know Javascript.

#8 It was like pulling teeth to get time off to attend a conference even if you paid for it with your own money.

#9 Lots of C-player engineers were promoted because they could play the politics while the good ones who actually could get things done/code left.

All of this was over a 2 year period just a few years ago, after Immelt declared they were a software company at one of their newly established "Innovation/Centers of Excellence". Needless to say I have moved on to more interesting work.

Though this is a little better than what was described during their outsourcing binge I just don't see GE ever really being able to take on software effectively. Their corporate culture is just not set up for it. They would be much better either having completely separate divisions that they own a stake in but do not manage in any way/shape/form or partnering with companies that do software well.

I would love to be wrong, but my guess is that a few decent engineers will join based on the slick ads, and maybe a updated office, things will fall apart and they will move on.