I like Whitehurst and have had the chance to meet him a few times. If you want to understand his ethos check out "The Open Organization". It details his transition from Delta to Red Hat and the transformation of his leadership style being around a lot of smart engineers and team players ready to constructively challenge each other. Good read for anyone interested in building inclusive company culture in tech.
Honestly, I thought IBM would be feel less rudderless with him at the helm. I wanted IBM to become more 'red' and not RH to become more 'big blue'- but it appears this isn't the case after all... seems like a short tenure.
Exception to this rule was NeXT purchasing Apple for negative $400 million.
Most of the NeXT senior staff (jabs, avi, etc) Went on to take over roles at Apple. They also brought in all the NeXT technology and threw out Apples' Nextstep/Openstep->Mac OSX
Steve Jobs had been gone for 12 years, there was plenty of culture clash and turf wars. Steve just managed to prevail.
When he returned, the workforce was pampered and attached to projects that weren't going anywhere. Steve removed a number of perks, and killed some of the biggest, most internally popular projects (Newton and OpenDoc come to mind). Lot's of people left.
But Steve came back to Apple as a savvy politician. He managed to get the board of directors in his back pocket, and sell his vision of Apple to the employees. Those that stayed, stayed because they came to believe in his vision, not because he placated them.
I will say this though, I think there's a truth underneath your statement. Apple attracted people who wanted to change the world. The culture may have been different, but there was still a core motivation in Apple employees that came from Steve's original vision of computing.
Minor correction: I wouldn’t call Newton an “internally popular product”. At least, working on Newton I didn’t feel that way. And just before SJ came back, Apple had spun Newton out into a separate company because it wasn’t really fitting in. SJ spun it back in and killed it.
The decision was in the hands of a board whose sole legal goal, these days, is securing maximal financial return for shareholders (and the shareholders agreed -- there was an explicit vote). A soul is a luxury that companies don't usually get to keep past IPO.
Sole? No. No matter how many times people repeat it. Or, at least, companies can and do spend money on things that can be argued to be in service of the long-term profit and image of the company. Otherwise, how could a company do charitable giving?
That said, if someone makes an offer for a public company, the board does pretty much need to put it to a shareholder vote although they can negotiate for a higher price and ultimately make a recommendation. But it's up to the shareholders. They're the ones that own the company.
This is why I'm in favor of founder controlled shares (Founder's Fund companies tend to do this - Zuckerberg at FB).
Founder's retain total voting control of the company and can do what they think is in the best interest of the company.
The board can complain and vote against it in favor of stupid short-term decisions that harm in the company, but in the end Zuck can tell them to fuck off and buy instagram because he thinks it's the right thing to do.
While I don't completely disagree, a Benevolent (or not) Dictator For Life can have it's own set of problems. And I'd not that it's generally not considered a great governance model for large open source projects--though that's obviously a somewhat different situation.
I agree founder led companies are more like dictatorships (though feudal earldoms may be a better analogy?), this becomes less true in older companies no longer lead by a founder. I agree there’s risk (founder could lose touch or go crazy), but I think that risk is less likely than bad board decisions by non-founders. It’s also bounded a bit by the ability to retain high quality talent.
I also agree that for collaborative open source projects a different approach is often preferable (as well as governments too obviously).
> And I'd [note?] that it's generally not considered a great governance model for large open source projects
Citation needed? Offhand, it's worked great for linux, and while perl and python have had some infamous problems, they don't seem particularly specific to the BDFL model, and they seemed to work well before that.
"long-term profit" is the long-term financial returns to shareholders -- and corporate philanthropy is generally held to be justified in B-school circles only in so far as it builds up marketable goodwill (again, adding shareholder value), not for its own sake.
This is why some companies and interests are better off staying private. SpaceX is a perfect example. Musk doesn't want to be accountable to shareholders for return on investment and annual results.
At that point though, just about any reasonable actions can be justified even if they're not in the interests of immediate quarter earnings per share. And that's not what most people arguing that the board is legally required to maximize profits are talking about.
That really shouldn't have been a surprise to anybody, certainly no one who has been through a corporate merger before.
The aquiring company always makes promises they won't change the aquired company, the aquired company's management parrots that line and in the end, the aquired company always gets subsumed into the aquiring company.
As someone who spent 8 years inside Red Hat, this is exactly why anecdotal "evidence" is garbage.
Complaining that an engineering company is full of mostly white males (in an industry which is full of mostly white mails) is an example of nothing. Red Hat started programs to push LGBTQ+ people in 2014, women in leadership in 2017, neurodiversity acceptance in 2018, black leadership in 2018. You may think all of those things are late, but as driven company missions which they spend real money on (and real money on community involvement on), it's not insignificant.
A "good-old-boy's club" at a company where only 25% of engineering was even in the US is a little mindblowing. The vast majority of RH's engineers when I left were in Pune, Brno, Tel Aviv, and scattered across Europe (eastern and western), with a reasonable showing from Brazil.
Open source is, for better or worse, a place where a cult of personality matters. "This is a bad idea and we shouldn't do it" isn't personal. It's how the community interacts. It's an invitation to argue back and say "this is a good idea because XXX". This is basically how any upstream mailing list works also.
While Red Hat did have some cultural problems, they were primarily around resistance to establishing an engineering presence in China (and it's hard to fault them for that -- my team was truly geographically distributed, and adding someone in APAC would have meant we literally never could have met at the same time), and regional cultural attitudes.
I left last summer, along with a lot of other people, but your comment is apropos of nothing Red Hat was from 2013-2021.
Take that appeal to authority elsewhere, and the insults with it. As someone who was also at Red Hat for eight years (2009-2017) I'd say GP might have been off base but certainly not garbage. I heard more grossly sexist comments (or saw them on IRC) there than anywhere else. We're talking stuff that would lead to immediate mandatory diversity training the first time, or instant dismissal the second, at many companies (including IBM). "Who did she have to blow to get that job" particularly sticks in my mind. Most people didn't even bat an eye because that kind of stuff is totally allowable in the open-source communities these folks were part of. I also saw at least one person fired for refusal to work with people he considered "beneath" him socially. You might say it's good that the company took action, but it took over a year for that to happen and I don't think that would have been the case at a truly inclusive company. I suppose you can dismiss these (and plenty more I could relate) as mere anecdotes, but you haven't even provided those so that would be pretty hypocritical.
The vast majority of people I knew at Red Hat ranged from industry-average to absolutely excellent, but overall I'd say even Facebook had a better internal culture in terms of diversity etc. Painting RH as anything more than a typical tech company in those areas is a bit absurd.
For sensitive issues, it's hard to imagine this will lead to a constructive, curious conversation. It would be interesting, for example, if you and the GP tried to examine why you have such different experiences? Maybe you were in different places, working for different people, and saw different things? Maybe different job descriptions? The world is always much bigger than what we imagine.
This is not a "sensitive" issue, unless you consider GP's opinion "sensitive". I don't. I also don't think it would lead to a curious, constructive conversation. There is probably nothing OP could offer which would change what the experience of 8 years in RH engineering showed me. At best, it would lead to another long reply where I tried to explain what RH was actually like versus GP's impression.
It's essentially GP posting on the Debian/OpenBSD/LK ML and saying "wow, these guys are arrogant". Well, they have strong opinions, and they need to justify them. If you don't have thick skin, you should probably avoid upstream discussions. It doesn't mean you should cast aspersions on the developers or their communities/companies. Linus is an incredibly nice person, but you wouldn't think it if all you saw was his mails blasting Intel for Spectre/Meltdown. You'd have a very different opinion of the man than who he is in 99% of interactions, and commenting about it on HN would be likely to get a reply similar to mine.
GP only had "anecdotal" experience with Red Hat versus actually working inside the company. When I started, I was worried that it would be different "behind the curtain". It was not. The other who mentioned junior engineers speaking up if they disagreed was spot on.
In 201x (2015? 2017? I dunno), RH changed their pay structure from being bimonthly to biweekly in the US to align with the rest of the world. There were hundreds of replies to the entire company debating whether it was better to pay us once a month and manage your money better, or once a week to be more consistent, or...
That's what the company was. It was not by the time I left. Granted, when I started, RH HQ was still on a college campus. If all you ever read was upstream mailing lists, you'd get the feeling that everyone (Linux, Theo [not that he works for RH, obviously], Lennart, whomever) other than Dan Walsh was arrogant assholes. That's not representative of who they actually are.
Painting Red Hat with a broad brush from incidental interactions versus the perspective of someone who spent nearly a decade there is dramatically different. Did it have problems? Sure. But none of the ones GP mentioned. The world is much bigger than what GP imagined from his anecdotal experience.
RH was a unicorn, and it's gone. LinkedIn last summer was essentially rats fleeing a sinking ship. IBM spent $35B on a company with no actual assets (a few patents) other than smart, passionate people. They would have had to really try to screw it up. And they did. I don't honestly know if there will be another RH in the future, but I'm hoping there will be.
I agree with the rest of your comment but I just want to respond to this part:
>If you don't have thick skin, you should probably avoid upstream discussions
I have a humble request, please discontinue this attitude on your own projects and please encourage other upstreams to also discontinue it. I'm baffled as to why so many open source maintainers seem to confuse needing to defend technical decisions with "having a thick skin," they are not the same. It's perfectly possible to be opinionated and strongly scrutinize a technical decision, while also not being harsh and rude towards the person presenting it. If you believe those mailing lists are unsalvageably hostile, then in my opinion, they should just be shut down. That's not the kind of place to have official project communication.
> I also don't think it would lead to a curious, constructive conversation. There is probably nothing OP could offer which would change what the experience of 8 years in RH engineering showed me.
To me, the intentional insistence that you want to and will remain ignorant undermines the credibility of the rest of the comment. Who knows what else have you shut your mind to and thus overlooked at RH.
On the contrary, I find it very realistic. We don't have time to argue with every single individual who thinks we're wrong, no matter how much we might think _they're_ the ones in the wrong. With people like the GP, there's just no convincing them, you just have to move on and not waste your own time trying to debate with them.
> We don't have time to argue with every single individual who thinks we're wrong
Sure, but then don't enter the discussion at all. It's generally no faster to fight with the other person than to try to understand them.
> no matter how much we might think _they're_ the ones in the wrong
That assumes that's the point of the discussion. Do it to find out about the other person, help them find out about you, and to explore what they know and what you know.
> there's just no convincing them
I think that assumes, again, this adversarial fight. I'm not trying to convince them (see above). And often, people are open and curious if you approach or respond to them differently.
Generally most M&A's like this turn into a talent smasher event (think atom smasher, aka particle accelerator), and the people scatter to the four winds in hundreds/thousands of different landing zones instead of coalescing into another convergent organization. Emergent consensus centered around such a large organization takes a lot of effort and time to build because it operates through social trust pathways (that predominantly operate in the time domain), and once fissioned, the byproducts do not transitively transfer that trust, it has to be built anew.
This adds to my suspicions that the long-term IBM C-suite goal of the Red Hat acquisition is to eventually convert Red Hat to be like their captive mainframe revenue and profit stream. I would not at all be surprised to see a gradual deterioration in Red Hat quality in the coming 10 years.
Watch the general level of support engineering skills in what will eventually be a Blue-washed Red Hat L2 Support. That is your canary. What you are used to today in that tier will be gradually relegated to the tech leads for L2. Don't look for tech leads by title; look for the leads who gates decisions to escalate to L3. Highly-skilled L2 organizations grant most if not all their support engineers autonomy to escalate to L3. Profit-squeezing L2 organizations (what I suspect may be happening with Red Hat in the coming years) will gate those escalations, and staff vacancies with relatively down-skilled engineers.
Note that I also enjoy working with these relatively down-skilled engineers. No complaints about "bedside manners", and they can address common scenarios. Given enough time and exposure to more experienced staff, they would absolutely step up to highly-skilled L2 levels. The challenge is often these situations see those more experienced staff leave too soon. In my experience you need at least 7, ideally 14 years to season new staff to those skill levels, and the attrition rate is high over that time; troubleshooting well under pressure with grace is a very difficult combination of skills and characteristics to find.
Two ways I've seen to effectively deal with this on the customer end is find an alternative solution (not really feasible in this case at this time, though I'm watching several possible developments), or up-skill your staff. You'll know you've reached the right skill level when your engineers can delve into the internals of the product sufficiently that they routinely convince the down-skill L2 support engineers to escalate their lead within a day or two of engaging.
If my suspicions bear fruit (I really hope not, the vast majority of my clients hold massive people and capital investments in the Red Hat ecosystem), then this is extremely bullish for AWS. Their customer-obsession-to-a-fault culture would swiftly exploit IBM's strategy, and there would be no contest. I can see several simultaneous attacks AWS could mount to neutralize Red Hat's position if IBM's strategy at the end of the day really is what I currently suspect.
I'd really like to hear from others that have found other workarounds for this eventuality.
I don't see how RH customers can become a captive revenue stream like mainframe has; there are a few other distributions with enterprise support (like SUSE/Ubuntu) to migrate to as well as community distributions (like Debian) that can be used if you have in-house engineers.
Disclosure: I might be biased as a Debian user/contributor.
> I don't see how RH customers can become a captive revenue stream like mainframe has...
In the 10-15 year time frame: IBM can't. Simple as that.
In the 3-10 year time frame however, which not coincidentally happens to be in the range of CEO tenures, the momentum of enterprise infrastructure relying upon a specific platform delivers a kind of lock-in that absolutely can be exploited by IBM leadership.
Look at Oracle. There are still quite a few use cases where their arguably painful pricing, licensing, and account relationship management experience are worth it. For some use cases, there is no other acceptable solution; I've seen them, and Oracle is damn impressive if you operate at that rarefied strata. But for arguably in the Pareto distribution of scenarios where Oracle is used, much of it like CRUD applications, Postgres does just fine.
Yet Oracle today is as dominant as ever in many enterprises.
When it comes to what can and cannot become captive revenue streams in the software market, I've learned to accept that the market can often be irrational for far longer than I can remain solvent.
I really like Debian. It is what I use in my personal servers. I'd like nothing better than to see it supplant Red Hat. But in the enterprise, the Debian story is under-developed. Debian is very rarely supported by application vendors. The LTS duration is half that of Red Hat. The members of the big, profitable enterprise market move that slowly.
I think those are tough problems to solve by someone like Ubuntu basing off a Debian distro to solve on their own. All the other challenges of interfacing with enterprise customers, communicating in their lingo, meeting them half-way, *etc., are addressable by a company organized around doing that using Debian, but there are inevitable questions of resolving differences of opinion in the future between the community and the company. I suspect Red Hat being both the distro and the commercial entity traded solving a lot of those types of problems with a different, more commercially-acceptable set of problems.
If RedHat were to be dissolved, there aren't enough companies paying for work on Free Software to absorb all the engineers that work at RedHat. For Free Software, this is one of the big dangers of having so many people working at the same place. If RH goes down, there are going to be a lot of projects with greatly reduced maintenance and some outright abandonment.
I'm curious if our interactions could be biased. For example, we're clients of RH (RHEL & Openshift) so I'm guessing we interact with more presentable humans. Everyone I've met has been genuinely wonderful and supportive across eng, sales, product, TAM, etc. One of the few vendors I enjoy working with.
I used inclusive in this context to mean that a junior engineer is expected to speak up and offer input in an executive meeting if they have something to offer. Cutting through hierarchy, "good ideas come from everywhere". This could be idealistic but it helped me in eliciting input.
I don't know what it's like to be on the inside or close periphery to daily core operations at RH. I agree and understand completely what you are saying. "Free speech" has (recently?) been a guise to act terribly toward each other in a number of settings. Trolls gonna troll. It's important to maintain decorum in the workplace and a culture that defies that can turn toxic quickly.
Redhat are one of the few real open source companies that made a commercial success of things.
From the outside they seemed pretty open. I've got no idea about how they did with black / LGBTQ+ - but it seems a big jump (in an industry where there are not that many black female LGBTQ+ engineers) to say they were so bad.
What is the engineering company with lots of black female LGBTQ+ folks? It might be helpful to be able to look at a model that has worked rather than just trashing RedHat for not being an engineering company that gets this right (and all these companies are pushing initiatives in most of these areas).
One of my recent revelations was when I told my teen children "... a company like IBM".
To what they said "what is IBM??"
They know all the large tech companies but that one was a surprise to them, they had a look at Wikipedia and said "ah yes, it was a great company in your times".
Even for me as a millennial, IBM is something of a history note.
Yes, I know them from computing history lectures, and I liked their ThinkPads (but they sold that to Lenovo when I was in high school).
I have only directly interacted with IBM product once, and that was Lotus Notes in one corporation I worked as a tech support in university years. And it was horrible.
At university, I thought of IBM as "they do things that are invisible but probably important?", but now I guess they don't do even that.
Not really. Lotus Notes was an MS-Access system that would attempt to do database synchronization between a server copy of the database and the local client. It was built in an age where road warriors were expected to take their laptops with them, be able to enter sales data, then have that automatically merged on return to the office. In a dial up age and before wifi, this gave unprecedented tools to those who needed to work away from their desks.
The problem was that it has serious scaling issues, and when you move mail to it (and remember it has to do the synchronisation step when you return) it can bog down both the server And the client. It was far less efficient than, say, pop and imap.
IBM took a bet that they could make Notes scale to the entire org in the mid-to-late ‘90s, and it took many years to get there and much pain along the way.
Any large and crufty system can start to have problems as they grow older but “fixing notes” wasn't a programming issue but a design one.
In todays terminology, it would be the equivalent of a replicated/distributed MongoDB with the designated “master” on the server, with a cached full copy of that database on your laptop (which isn't permanently connected), while allowing writes in both partitions (ie sacrificing consistency for availability) and then hoping when you connect it back up again that it can figure out the bidirectional sync and resolve any conflicts that occur.
And then on top of that build a mail client which stores one mail message per row (including all attachments) along with status bits (read, important, replied etc) and hope to heck it all works.
Lotus Notes “synchronization” was the step you did after docking your thinkpad just before going to get your first coffee of the day, because hopefully the latency would be hidden by the brewing time.
The it, in "they could have fixed it," was referring to the unique interface of the client. Which I do believe could have been standardized, at least to a larger degree than it was.
When I was growing up, my mother was at IBM designing software for the space shuttle, and the street next to my house was named IBM. I was named after one of their senior engineers. So the company played a big part in my childhood and was ever present in the community, and we still have lots of IBM space swag stored away in the attic, including the silver snoopy given to my mom during her time there. The stock grants paid for our education, and my mom still lives off the pension they had. The early 90s was such an optimistic time.
At some point IBM sold off the unit, vacated the office block, and the street was renamed to that of the new company that moved in. Eventually, all the shuttle workers would be laid off after the demise of the program, so it's sad to see how it all ended.
I wonder if the children of FAANG employees would feel similar to what you felt. I suspect that may not be the case, since most companies don't really make such long term investments anymore.
I think those companies still exist, but they exist in China.
I might be wrong though. I just see the growth of China and decline of the US, and I cannot stop feeling like those two are connected. But what do I know. People were afraid about Japan before.
And now the world's largest car manufacturer is Toyota, the biggest gaming providers are Nintendo and Sony, and Mitsubishi and Hitachi are important players in every industry. American manufacturing in the same industries are down. People seeing the growth of Japan and decline of the US were only wrong in a matter of degree.
I wish that the USA would take advantage of where we have advantages: agriculture, the creative entertainment industry, and our rich cultural differences. To the last point: when I travel around the US, I feel like I am in different countries with different politics and cultures. I hope we learn to support and appreciate other subcultures.
Except for top performers and people inheriting great wealth, Americans really need to adjust their expectations of what their material life will be. Happily, I see this in young people who aren’t buying into materialism and prefer life style, travel, etc. and realize that living within their means is better than long term debt.
China like Japan has it's own problems. In the case of the US, offshoring of manufacturing surely played a part but greater than that is the financialization of the economy, decline of the middle class, and the capture of wealth generation in the hands of a few.
Yes, Jim Cramer coined the term AFAIK. Though it did map reasonably well to comp, in part because tech workers usually had RSUs as a major part of their comp.
I'm 33, allergic to IBM (and Oracle), want to stay away from their products if possible.
Luckily I know nothing about IBM, only the spectrum protect backup... I mean why everything has to be so complicated? Ugly?
Props for having documentation + they support lots of OSes and features. But when it comes to management... even Linux people in my office make fun of that product, because how awkward, complex and time consuming it is to do particular tasks there. I showed Veeam admin some spectrum protect stuff, because he had todo some task there... He just laughed out loud.
From what little exposure that I've had to IBM, Oracle, and professional HP products, it's the result of a different evolutionary line of computing. It predates personal computing (from back when there was allegedly market for 5 computers[0]), so its interface and naming conventions are foreign to each other, as if it lives in ivory towers and never mixes with anything else. It's painfully obvious that personal computing moves much faster and is easier to use.
I do. I can manage services I need on my raspberry. That is not sole exposure to Linux and not afraid of it.
Anyways, I get that IBM is a big whale. It just i rather avoid their products.
But speaking for spectrum protect... the more I think of it, the more I understand that it is the configuration and usage of the product I really dislike. And the embarrassment of helping customers configuring/troubleshooting that product. Otherwise it is solid. Once configured, does its job pretty well and solid. And we are a service provider - it was actually capable of providing with the feature set a service provider needs to.
IBM doesn't make consumer products, as they did in decades past. I would imagine there are a lot of successful technology companies without a consumer side that your kids aren't familiar with. Booz Allen?
I interned at IBM Canada in the late 90s and I remember back then among my peer group, the only thing we cared about was that they made great laptops in the ThinkPad line (now owned by Lenovo, of course).
It definitely felt like an "old" company even then. I remember they were very big on patents and were proud of the fact that they had a huge patent war chest.
Lots of nostalgia in this thread. However, I recently started playing around with IBM's quantum computer cloud service and it has been by far the best experience compared to other players. Who knows, that might be their come back story!
To be totally honest, I too had completely forgotten about IBM. In my mind, they are synonymous with processes and bureaucracy. No idea if that's fair; they are big nowadays, they must be doing something right (other than paying $20M to get rid of Ginni Rometty after she showed one mediocre year after another).
IBM portfolio isn't targeted to consumers like Apple's or other companies, even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name. The only consumer facing product they had for the longest time were cash registers, and those aren't particularly hip as to live in consumer imagination
Edit: in today episode, hacker news forget they're a niche cohort.
How many times was that phrase used in computer magazines? I kind of forgot about it, this thread has brought me back to the days I would sift through computer magazines at book stores.
Remember when IBM tech powered every popular video game console? Not long ago. I thought having POWER machines for gaming was very cool. It didn't worked out for some reason.
I dunno. I thought it worked out pretty well...it just didn't last into subsequent generations. But then, in gaming consoles, up until the current fad of "meh...just make it a PC", every generation of console was, architecturally speaking, new territory.
yeah, in my early youth "IBM" or "IBM Compatible" (for the value shoppers out there, such as my family) was very much a household name...if your household had a computer at all, that is.
PC's were big in the 80s, and 'PC' meant IBM PC (or clone). The rest of us had 'commodore's or 'atari's - we didn't have 'pc's. It was also the heyday of computer magazine's from PC shopper to DDJ and Compute! Computers weren't as unknown back then as people like to think..
So I'd argue IBM was a household name as far back as the mid-80s.
Much longer ago than that. I'm quite certain that long before there even was an IBM PC and almost certainly before I touched an IBM Selectric, I would have known IBM as a computer company. If someone in the 1960s had been asked to name a computer company, they would have named IBM and I'm not talking about nerdy niche audiences.
The IBM Thinkpad was probably the most well known laptop brand for 10-15 years. Even now I would guess people still equate “Thinkpad” with IBM even though they sold it off to Lenovo 15 years ago.
As an IBMer at the time, I remember having conversations about how that decision would ultimately doom IBM to irrelevance since it would remove IBM entirely from the consumer market...
Don’t forget they sold the tiny HDD division to Hitachi (I believe) in like 1999 or 2000, which went on to earn billions from the iPod. Not a lot of good business decisions coming out of IBM.
Despite not having one, I was mystified by such the obviously terrible idea of selling off the daily "I love my IBM" from who knows how many tech people's lives.
As far as I'm concerned, the term "PC" comes from the "IBM PC"[1]
> "The PC was IBM's first attempt to sell a computer through retail channels [...] they partnered with the retail chains ComputerLand and Sears Roebuck"
> "Reception was overwhelmingly positive [...] the IBM PC immediately became the talk of the entire computing industry.[38] Dealers were overwhelmed with orders [...] By the time the machine was shipping, the term "PC" was becoming a household name.[39] [...] Sales exceeded IBM's expectations by as much as 800%, shipping 40,000 PCs a month at one point.[40] The company estimate that 50 to 70% of PCs sold in retail stores went to the home."
It is worth noting how small the market was at the time though, "In 1983 they sold more than 750,000 machines" - Apple has just passed 100,000,000 iPhone 12s in six months since launch.
> It is worth noting how small the market was at the time though, "In 1983 they sold more than 750,000 machines" - Apple has just passed 100,000,000 iPhone 12s in six months since launch.
which is the goddamn point. it was a name in tech circles, and this community forgets how small tech circles were back then
heck, someone even cited the cell processor in playstation. outside the nerdiest of gamers, very few actually cared, and the name that stuck and resonated from that item was playstation, not ibm anyway.
want some name that public would recognize in the 80s? try nintendo and sega.
>>>> I told my teen children "... a company like IBM". To what they said "what is IBM??"
kid back then would have had the same reaction as the gp kids at hearing ibm.
this community is completely out of touch and filled with vitriol.
In 1970, IBM was #5 on the Fortune 500. Now, a young kid might not have heard of them because they never saw the logo on anything or used any of their products. But I'm pretty sure any reasonably well-educated adult [ADDED: or college student/probably teen] would have heard of them just like they would have heard of most of the largest US companies.
which means nothing, jesus, are people not able to follow a thread anymore?
the whole thing was an answer to this:
>>>> I told my teen children "... a company like IBM". To what they said "what is IBM??"
answer wouldn't have changed in the sixties, seventies, nor eighties. mayyybe in the nineties, for the short period laptop became sought after and thinkpad the peak of the form factor.
Now you're just being rude and I and others are telling you that you're almost certainly wrong. I'm not particularly surprised that a teen today wouldn't have heard of IBM. (It's a large, but one of many, enterprise computing suppliers. I assume they haven't heard of VMware or Oracle either.) I actually would be surprised if a typical child of the Space Age in 1970 wouldn't have heard of it given that IBM pretty much was COMPUTER in the public mind.
I'm pretty sure I would have known most of the largest US companies as a teen, including IBM, because of their cultural ubiquity, not because I had a PC (which didn't exist).
In 1997, IBM Deep Blue beat chess Grandmaster Gary Kasparov and made international news. IBM sponsored the Olympic Games for 40 years, they sponsored the 1995 Wimbledon tennis tournament, the ATP Tour, the US Open, French Open, Australian Open tennis tournaments, the Masters golf tournament, baseball games, auto racing, college football. Dave Bowman wore an IBM logo on his spacesuit in 2001 A Space Odyssey while people argued that "HAL 9000" was based on "IBM" with the letters shifted.
"At the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia, IBM demonstrates the largest integrated information technology system ever seen by a mass audience."
"The National Hockey League, in partnership with IBM, form an alliance - NHL Interactive Cyber Enterprises - that will use new and emerging technology to promote the growth of hockey worldwide. The Professional Golf Association of America teams with IBM to present a state-of-the-art cybercast of the 78th PGA Championship which takes place in August in Louisville, Kentucky"
"IBM is the largest corporate contributor in 1996. Over the last decade, IBM has contributed more than $1.3 billion to nonprofit organizations, schools and universities - close to four million hours of volunteer time in the United States alone,"
"[1997] The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recognizes IBM for outstanding contributions in protecting the Earth's ozone layer."
"[1998] U.S. Vice President Al Gore announces Blue Pacific - the world's fastest computer - which is jointly developed by the U.S. Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM"
"[1998] The Guiness Book of Records officially recognizes IBM for setting two world records in Internet traffic on the 1998 Nagano Olympic Winter Games Web site: "The Most Popular Internet Event Ever Recorded""
I can imagine that there were people who had never heard of them, but they were an enormous company with fingers in hundreds of pies, in the news often, in all sorts of ways - business, finances, sports, environmental, education, charity, employment, investment in factories - in newspapers, magazines, talking head pieces, they were as household name as any massive company, nothing like the "do you know the manufacturer of the Playstation graphics chip???" that you're presenting them as.
To have not heard of them at all whatsoever in the 1990s you don't need to be outside a business, you need to be under a rock, basically never see a TV, newspaper, hear a radio news broadcast, watch a sporting event with sponsor logos, visit any city with billboards, or be tangential to any of their hundreds of thousands of employees, none of your parents or your friends parents working for them, or anything. It really isn't like "can you name the senior vice presidents of CK Prahalad's management consultancy". It's more like "yeah of course teens haven't heard of Ford or FedEx, they don't buy pickup trucks and aren't logistics specialists".
> "discounting the rampant americentrism"
I'm not American. But if your position is reduced to "a North Korean farmer's child wouldn't have heard of them", then it's not a very strong position.
In IBM's heydey, everyone knew who IBM was. Even before the PC, IBM was synonymous with "computer". People knew computers were important, even if they had never seen one outside of a movie.
> even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name
I'm curious to see data on this. My guess is that in the early to mid 80s, IBM had to have been the top consumer technology brand. At least in knowledge of the brand, even if they didn't own one. Their Charlie Chaplin ads were everywhere, then they spent an enormous amount of money marketing PCjr[1].
[1] - "As part of $32.5 million in advertising for the computer during 1984, it began what the company described as the most extensive marketing campaign in IBM history, in which 98% of Americans would see at least 30 PCjr advertisements in the last four months of the year". (From Wikipedia)
my impression of the mid '90s was that IBM also spent a boatload on OS/2 Warp marketing as well. But by that time everyone was on Windows and wanted Windows95. The ads for Warp were everywhere, in print and on TV. IBM seemed to be reliving the same mistakes they made with the PS/2 and micro channel arch.
I can't picture IBM being consumer.. they were too deep and too big. They didn't speak mainstream .. Jobs had some stuff to sell (aesthetics, art, culture) .. IBM had 'enterprise grade'.
> even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name
In addition to other examples in the thread, OS/2 Warp was a direct competitor to Windows 95. We could be using OS/2 today instead of Windows had it become successful.
There were IBM cash registers and they outperformed modern equipment in scanner performance by a wide margin 30 years ago. That division was sold off to Toshiba.
It's funny because when I read something like this (and your pretty harsh replies) I feel attacked! I mean, there are a lot of reasons you might say this including but not limited to: you weren't alive (or were too young) in the 70s/80s, you were in a country that had a different culture, you grew up in your own bubble.
And maybe, just maybe, my memory is bad. But I really feel almost gaslit. Like where someone is telling me my lived experience wasn't my lived experience. I remember IBM as one of the most recognizable brands of the time. I recall in social studies class a teacher talking about how IBM sold calculating devices to Nazi Germany during the war. I remember another class where we discussed IBMs infamous "THINK" posters, which we discussed in relation to propaganda and subliminal messaging. I remember that THINK poster showing up as a gag in the early Simpsons TV show. When Apple made the famous super bowl commercial where the athlete throws a sledge-hammer at the George Orwell-esque Big Brother screen, every news outlet was going on-and-on about how it was a direct attack on IBM and the stodgy perception that PCs were only for business. And of course the whole Deep Blue chess match. Heck, even the Jeopardy Watson thing had IBM branding all over it. In all of those cases IBM had a cultural currency that anchored the discussion.
I would honestly be completely and genuinely surprised to find any people in my age group born and raised in North America wouldn't immediately recognize the IBM brand.
When I think of niche tech brands from that time I believe Oracle and Cisco fit that "you only know if you know" kind of niche. But IBM? It actually feels so completely unbelievable to me that it can't be true. But hey, maybe you're right and I'm wrong?
When I talk to former IBMers (including a VP), it seems much of the outward “success” there is financial engineering, yet the business is crumbling in reality. Jim leaving amidst a chaotic, failed email migration that is impacting sales is not surprising
> leaving amidst a chaotic, failed email migration that is impacting sales is not surprising
I'm not sure if you're trying to imply causation here, but vast sweeping changes like this rarely happen in a matter of days - it's far more likely that this has been in the works for a while, and the email mess is coincidental.
They long ago moved from the innovation business to the share buyback business. It’s crazy that a tech company struggles so much to innovate that the best use of their cash is either returning money to shareholders, or buying companies on their behalf.
We all hoped it wouldn't happen, but RedHat is going to become more blue rather than the other way around. It's the way with all acquisitions unfortunately. As a current IBMer, I'm fascinated with this and I wonder what Arvind's end goal was here? It certainly doesn't seem like it was Jim's idea.
An email migration was that important that they decided to shake up quite a bit of the exec team? Or was the email migration stuff just internal politics playing out in the news?
probably not. IBM haven't been that much relevant in tech for years. they pivot to the cut throat consulting services while kind of abandoned what IBM used to be. a tech leader.
Microsoft was like IBM after Bill Gates. Not a tech leader for many years until Microsoft pivot to Cloud computing and software as services.
Microsoft was not like IBM after Bill Gates. Not remotely close.
Microsoft was still overwhelmingly a product company in the decade after Gates. It did not abandon its product-centric focus and switch to a service-centric business model ala IBM. IBM hasn't been a product heavy company in several decades at this point. Microsoft never stopped being product heavy.
IBM liquidated its core product businesses, one after another. Microsoft never did that.
Microsoft's sales increased dramatically during the Ballmer years, going from $23b in 2000 to $77b in 2013. IBM's sales haven't increased like that in decades (quite the opposite in fact, they've had a stagnant or contracting business for a long time).
The cloud boom that Microsoft is currently enjoying, was planted during the Ballmer era, and it's being very successfully harvested during the Nadella era.
Nadella is a superior CEO to Ballmer, and far superior at product. However Ballmer did not wreck the ship nor switch Microsoft to being primarily service focused in the model of IBM. IBM by contrast is a wrecked ship.
IBM in its heyday (1930s through the '70s) wasn't primarily a service company either -- its core products were always data processing equipment (computers, and the plugboard-programmed punched card tabulators and other gear that preceded them). It became largely a service company in a pivot -- executed slowly over many years -- after losing dominance in the DP equipment market.
I don't know what's with payroll management software (low-hanging government contracts ? Inter-agency factionalism ?) but every time I hear about a nationwide software-inflicted catastrophe somewhere, it's one of those.
In France we've had to deal with LOUVOIS, the payroll software for all the armed branches, being an unending train wreck. There were quite a few families of deployed soldiers who had to deal with near-bankruptcy because of it.
One of my favorite lessons "learned the hard way" by someone else. You fundamentally cannot run a business on poor data practices. It will sink you before you realize what happened.
Not trying to downplay that one either, but Pheonix put thousands of people in major financial risk and/or ruin, and at least 1 suicide was attributed to it.
But it's sadly fairly normal for tech consulting companies. Worked at some, all it projects were horrible and staffed from top to bottom and management barely looked at it.
Why?
Because the money making was more important (getting projects, sending seniors and principals off to projects etc)
Focus on the core business competencies, of which email is clearly not one.
Edit since I can't reply: An extended email outage isn't a good look either. If IBM can't run their own critical systems, why trust them with yours? I personally think making the strategic decision to outsource demonstrates the ability and desire to find timely solutions.
I suspect that IBM would see both of those as competitors, which honestly makes it more embarrassing. They can't ask for help from people that know email at this scale because they are too busy trying to tell the F500 that they know cloud at this scale.
TLDR: due to a bad email migration, IBM has had massive email issues. Even the representative for the company had to give the statement to the press over the phone.
Early redhatter here. I will always have mixed feelings about Jim. On the one hand, I fully respect him, what he does, and how he does it. I think he was a good choice for redhat at the time.
However, his start also coincided with then end of the really fun times.
As someone who was following Red Hat as an industry analyst at the time, it was growing a lot and everything that implies came with it. To the sibling comment's point, that meant moving away from "everyone" knowing everyone else, moving away from a lot of people being involved with and knowledgeable about most of the company's technology (though JBoss was still sort of its own island at the time), and lots of things being sort of ad hoc. A lot of people had pretty flexible roles.
I won't say things totally changed but, as is necessary as you grow, more process was put in place, there was a more deliberate use of data, a shift from "random acts" that made sense in isolation to more programmatic ways of doing things.
These things weren't bad and were in fact needed. But, even if Red Hat wasn't really still a startup when Whitehurst took over, it wasn't really a mature large company either.
Cloud is the new mainframe. And IBM Cloud is terrible in comparison.
All you ever hear about is how challenging Kubernetes is to manage. IBM invested in self managed Kubernetes essentially while everyone else built SaaS Kubernetes Engine’s.
IBM feels like a collection of revenue lines that hasn’t really tapped into any new streams lately.
For what it's worth IBM has transitioned to OpenShift and it is a very successful product line. I think there are a lot of problems with marrying OpenShift with IBM's other products but OpenShift on IBM Cloud is pretty good.
I'm sure it's successful to some degree. They bought it, because it was a successful enterprise implementation.
That being said, I'm not sure why I would leverage OpenShift on IBM Cloud when I can get practically the same thing from the other providers with a stronger ecosystem of tooling.
Which leads me back to OpenShift on-premise and I'm just not sure that is where the market is at or headed right now.
I was considering applying to Red Hat and was assured by the fact that IBM put Jim in charge. Now that I see this I'm reconsidering Red Hat as a company.
My connections at RedHat say nothing has changed for them, and that RedHat is not IBM.
But Jim leaving does make it look less likely that IBM will be turning into RedHat anytime soon.
From what I'm told RedHat continues operating as an independent business unit under IBM.
Edit: full disclosure; I too am considering RedHat, as I'd like to resume full-time work on systemd/journald in the future and there aren't exactly many places employing people to work on upstream systemd. So I may be biased in wanting to believe the above is true, grain of salt and all.
They do indeed feel like 2 completely different companies. Different hiring processes, different employment contracts, different cultures, different offices, different tools, different management structures, different benefits. The biggest change I've seen is that they now trade under the same ticker symbol.
I am at RH right now, engineering. Things have really not changed. I will be honest I am a little nervous that Jim has left, but I think on the whole it's still a great place to work right now. In 3-5 years , who knows?
I'd really like to see IBMers talk about the past, present, and future of the company. It looks pretty pale to me.
Back in the Thinkpad era, IBM had a lot of cool stuff going on. But now it seems like a shadow.
Watson and IBM cloud look like flops. The email fiasco is weird and should never have happened.
What did buying Red Hat accomplish? As an outsider, it doesn't seem to have infused any new ideas, and the changes to centos just made people move further away AFAIK.
Or buying stuff like the Weather Channel?
The chip business looks promising. Maybe IBM should double down there?
Consulting, in general, seems to not be a great tool to sharpen internal capability. The constant layoffs of the past have also had a hugely deleterious effect.
IBM bought Red Hat for OpenShift. IBM buying Red Hat was supposed to propel OpenShift and Red Hats portfolio into the C-suite connections IBM had. Instead, it seems IBM has force marched Red Hat to focus all their energies on OpenShift at the expense of their larger portfolio. OpenShift probably isn't performing as well as IBM expected, and even with 4 it still carries the "OpenShift is not Kubernetes" vibe. IBM also has a bunch of products in their portfolio that compete with Red Hat.
On the IBM side, weird shit is a foot. The GTS spinoff into Khndryl is very, very bizarre. They're a profitable part of IBM but need to be excised, quickly? It's causing chaos for accounts that had deep GTS coverage as the account teams are basically adversarial. The rest of IBMs portfolio is stagnating as they chase fads and lose to niche players with better overall value. Especially with the Data/AI space, startups are killing them.
ex-IBMer here, product side: GTS sometimes had better private pricing and incentives for products from competitors that other business units couldn't match due to internal pricing policies.
Now try explaining to the customer why IBM is recommending an IBM's competitor while IBM is also offering the same product with a better price directly to the customer. It doesn't make sense at all.
Consider two service-focused business units (GTS and GBS) that sometimes are complementary but mostly adversarial and it is chaos for the customer.
Spinning-off GTS (and I dare say, GBS too) is better for the customer and for the product business units.
Containerizing IBM's software and forcing it all on OpenShift is such a weird move to me. When you force your customers to become Kubernetes admins when all they really want is some other solution I think you have a drastically smaller target.
I think a lot of Red Hatters are tired of having the IBM sales force show up in their OpenShift accounts asking about upgrading them to Cloud Paks.
Even worse is the IBM team trying to sell IBM cloud saying cloud-only is the way to go. Customer agrees and compares clouds, settles on AWS or Azure, then IBM team brings in Red Hat to pitch hybrid.
>What did buying Red Hat accomplish? As an outsider, it doesn't seem to have infused any new ideas, and the changes to centos just made people move further away AFAIK.
I am not an IBMer though have worked with many former IBM folks, and work with Red Hat on and off every month or so. From what I've gathered, Red Hat is the new core of IBM. The goal is to grow Red Hat, specifically their OpenShift offering (which is huge in gov't as it allows for hybrid clouds), and make centre the biz around that then the "traditional" IBM consulting style.
IBM’s core business is boring crap that doesn’t make the news. So, how the company is doing has little to do with the kinds of things you hear about. That said, their market cap peaked in 2012 at 240B vs 130B today and their revenue and profits are similarly down, which suggests things haven’t been going well for a long time.
The chip business has so much potential, and they're wasting it all because they're so stuck in their enterprise marketing and sales model. There is so much demand out there for non-X86 workstations with high performance and large core counts, and they won't even touch it. There is so much demand out there for highly scalable and energy efficient cloud professors (to the point that they're developing them independently), and they won't even touch it. Just sell the damn processors to the people who want them already!
There are many very well funded companies working on merchant non-x86 processors. There’s no reason to think IBM would be any better at it or that customers would prefer to buy from IBM.
IBM once had a deep, deep bench of engineering talent and squandered it away. They failed to maintain the engineering culture while making many strategic mistakes (cloud).
Starting in the late 2000s and early 10s, executives were crying for 'cloud skills' as part of their continuous 'workforce remix'. Did Amazon build AWS by hiring cloud skills? Of course not. You build a cloud with a wide array of talent including hardware, chip design, software, and systems engineering. IBM had all that available in house.
True. I remember in that big data hustle in last decade, some morons were claiming that Google is facing problem in hiring Hadoop talent. Imagine that!
>Back in the Thinkpad era, IBM had a lot of cool stuff going on. But now it seems like a shadow.
I remember their stuff from the pre-Thinkpad era. Quite a company. Working for both a large competitor and for a small company that was trying to sell to them they seemed clumsy but still had an amazing portfolio.
My guess is that they just need to merge/break-up/reconfigure into oblivion. Just another AT&T/HP/ITT/Polaroid/Xerox
Having worked at one of those that also did business with IBM, I felt there was an ethos I observed in the upper ranks that is hard to describe. It was like they felt they were better than others, had large egos about their brand and had a certain stuffiness to them where they knew what was right because it was them. Like a business book/MBA club of sorts. Kinda hard to describe it.
Anyhow I wonder if this better-than-thou, stuffy corporate attitude leads itself to internal re-org cycles where it results in no identity and no central vision, just internal battles.
It seems like other similar size large companies, like Apple, can be successful so maybe their leadership doesn't show these character traits?
When I had to deal with some small tendril of IBM, I think the anti-trust suit was still in the works. It probably scarred their dealings with other companies to the same degree that their dominance did.
> The chip business looks promising. Maybe IBM should double down there?
I always thought IBM should have bought ARM, the combination of IBM chip tech plus ARMs designs and Red Hat for the software stack would make for an amazing tech business.
This is a really nifty 'what it' to think about, but I don't think IBM needed ARM to have owned the world. They had/have POWER & PPC, and the associated development ecosystem, which gave them processor coverage from low-end embedded thru supers. They just needed to tweak their go-to-market to match the flexibility that ARM has given their licensees and it could have been a very different story.
ex-IBMer here. I rode this from 2001 until 2016 when it became clear that breaking up the company (as they recently did) would become the only sensible path forward.
While many poor decisions were made inside of the company, I ultimately blame Wall Street for IBM's downfall. Remember that back in 2011, Palmisano finished strong with IBM's Watson winning Jeopardy, IBM Software delivering consistent >80% profit margins on $10Bs in revenue, and a strong services backlog.
Many don't know that Palmisano's departure was preceded by a Wall Street mediated competition for the successor. IBM Software Group SVP, Steve Mills, was the obvious choice. The guy was a lifetime IBMer, intellectually superb, allegedly with photographic memory, effective public speaker, and with a proven history of leading (at the time) the 3rd largest software business in the world.
Unfortunately, Wall Street didn't like Mills because he did not come across well on CNBC. The guy is chubby and doesn't look like a conventional CEO. So Ginny Rometty, with a claim to fame based on building IBM Global Business Services from on the PwC acquistion became the leading candidate. Ginny is "media friendly" and the diversity factor didn't hurt.
Once Ginny came on board, leadership style changed from long-term to fickle and neurotic. Instead of committing to the hard work of building complex technology (e.g. cloud), any signs of technological challenges became reasons for business strategy changes at the top level. What started as a build decision (IBM SmartCloud) turned into a buy decision (Softlayer), followed by a build decision (IBM Bluemix), and so on.
However, Ginny's biggest failure was her inability to raise capital on Wall Street. IBM's engineers weren't failing at building cloud technology because the engineers were terrible (some were, normal distribution rules still apply) but because cost cutting policies starved engineering teams though attrition and lack of hiring. Staffing a team meant bringing in internal hires w/o the right skill set or taking a gamble on offshore (global) resource. At the same time Google was hiring left and right with comparative ease (as an aside, now they are dealing with the consequences).
Bottom line, Ginny couldn't get the capital to fund internal engineering efforts for the scale of the transformation needed to sustain IBM's success with machine learning (Watson) and cloud.
I place the blame on Wall Street since they made the bet on Ginny and then left her out to dry.
Wall Street? Couldn't raise capital? Maybe IBM could have used some of the $110 billion dollars they spent on buying back shares to, I don't know, build a real business? IBM could potentially have built what is now AWS but what did they do instead? Share buybacks. What do they have to show for that?
IBM has been essentially a financial engineering machine for many years, with their ridiculous 5-year EPS targets and all the rest of it. While I was there they even removed plants, copiers, coffee machines, televisions, pads, pencils, pens and everything else in sight to "save" money.
The "leadership" of IBM drove the company in to the ground, period.
>Maybe IBM could have used some of the $110 billion dollars they spent on buying back shares to, I don't know, build a real business?
You just answered your own question. As I pointed out, leadership was "picked" by Wall Street investors. Share buybacks and financial engineering exist to keep the investors happy.
If they didn't buy back shares and invested in R&D the stock would have gone straight down instead of sideways. As I said the leadership "couldn't get the capital to fund internal engineering efforts for the _scale_ of the transformation needed to sustain IBM's success"
> Google was hiring left and right with comparative ease (as an aside, now they are dealing with the consequences).
In the five years since you left IBM in 2016, GOOG has tripled in value, while IBM has lost 8 percent. I think I know which set of consequences I'd prefer to deal with as an executive, shareholder, or employee.
IBM generates $15b of free cash flow per year. They did not need to raise anything from Wall Street. And the notion that Wall Street would somehow interfere with an internal succession process because they thought a brilliant tech executive was not very polished is laughable.
I was an intern at IBM from 2010-2015, and then an full time engineer for a short while before moving on.
I agree completely that the change in leadership marked an inability to really bring WATSON to market, and some other products too.
While I was an intern, I sat next to ExtremeBlue interns and team members working on Watson. The technology was awesome and they were working like mad. Sleeping under the desk. By 2015 the push had stopped and everyone knew it was a failure to launch.
"I agree completely that the change in leadership marked an inability to really bring WATSON to market, and some other products too."
Watson for all it's academic glory, was kind of vapourware as a product.
It just never really did anything materially useful. They did a lot of hospital trials that fizzled. Way, way over-promised.
A little bit along the lines of ElementAI - it's hard to commercialized AI directly.
Google et. al. do it right by incrementally improving things like translation, voice recognition ... it's making waves within academia for it's quality, but it's something consumers are hardly aware of.
Since IBM is not a consumer company, there's only so much sugar and hype that Watson can provide (winning Jeopardy was a brilliant thing) before the rubber has to hit the rode.
I'm not so sure if it's fair to blame a new leader for that one ... because I'm not sure what a realistic business application for Watson would be. (Maybe there are hard and real products, but they're probably going to be very context specific etc..)
Building great tech is hard enough, then building great products on top of that - just as hard. Doing it within a massive multinational that makes it's money from grifting governments and megacorps into paying for really expensive services probably just is not going to work.
MS, Google, FB ... they have the operational fidelity and product line to leverage AI internally, IBM, not so much.
I don't know what the future of IBM looks like aside from just being another Accenture.
Interesting perspective. They were advertising WATSON everywhere and it did seem like they wanted it to be big. I worked for rational doing... less savoury stuff but it did pay the bills!
I worked in the Watson group during the time you mention - the problem that they made was to attempt to productize the original Jeopardy system. The Jeopardy system was built with the single-minded goal of winning jeopardy. It was much too heavy weight for real-world applications - it required unbelievable computing resources and simply could not be deployed in the cloud as it could only run on Power machines.
Ultimately much of the system had to be rewritten and this took years by which time, it was just another competitor in a crowded market
Sam's EPS target was the singular focus during that time. Executive management squeezed everything for the last penny during that period, IMO setting the path to failure.
Exactly! Palmisano was squeezing every last cent and starving the company of resources for developing the future. Even by 2008, it was clear hat cloud computing was the next big wave and yet IBM built out its own half-baked internal cloud offering before acquiring Softlayer
I wasn’t a fan of Red Hat or the acquisition but it seems like they are pretty much turning it into a (small) revenue stream to be optimized rather than something transformational.
Am I the only one who feels like IBM could be circling the drain like when they missed out on PCs?
He let thousands of IBM point of sale systems to be replaced with crap that can't buffer keystrokes - instead of modernizing the SDKs for those who know Linux and not AIX.
He bought RedHat, but not Digital Ocean so they had a cloud consumers trust.
He didn't win a serious contract with Facebook for kernel tuning. He didn't win a serious contract with AWS for AWS Linux 3.
He let COBOL and APL continue to die instead of funding modern tooling.
I'm guessing Arvind Krishna by the "He bought RedHat...". But I didn't realize the IBM CEO is expected by investors (or anyone really) to be that involved in those kinds of sales mentioned in the other points.
Agnostic of actual political nonsense, an email scandal finally gets someone in leadership. That's the unluckiest SOB ever.
PS: After an experimental physics colloquia on their campus up the hill, IBM Almaden offered me a paid dark matter RA job when I was 15. It didn't happen thanks to sabotaging parents. Also, a computer scientist-programmer lady from IBM volunteered her time at my high-school which was really cool.
I saw this coming even before the acquisition. While Red Hat did help fund some excellent open source work, usually through acquisitions, they would never have been my first choice for partner support. Red hat is for companies that have no clue what they are doing and caters to executive management who wants their name in marketing so they can talk about how they helped make the company more successful so they can find a higher paying executive role at another large enterprise. Once a company has some descent Linux engineers and developers, they then switch to CentOS, Ubuntu, or some lighter weight distro. At that point, if you continue to engage with Red Hat, usually because some executive is getting kickbacks and has signed multi-year contracts, you just end up doing all the work yourself realizing that a lot of your problems are caused by Red Hat and that you'd be better off with another distro entirely.
Honestly, I thought IBM would be feel less rudderless with him at the helm. I wanted IBM to become more 'red' and not RH to become more 'big blue'- but it appears this isn't the case after all... seems like a short tenure.
Anyone know more about the new leadership?