After the Red Hat mess I see many people saying IBM destroys everything they touch, but I can’t think of many examples of it. Can you tell me what else IBM has destroyed after acquiring it, or something good that they themselves developed and then ruined it with stupid corporate choices?
Having used PC for a long time, I’d say… The PC 😁
MCA bus for instance
OS/2 was poised to be a really awesome operating system. Bad decisions and poor marketing really eff’ed that up. We could have had a full GUI, multi-user OS for consumers like 10 good years earlier than we did and it likely would have curbed Microsoft’s monopoly.
They are driven by quarterly earnings. No company can be successful long term when focusing on maximum profit in the next three months. So they buy a company at the top and ride the money wave until they aren’t profitable, then sell the name or IP to another company, lather, rinse, repeat.
They did this with PCs, Storage, big data, Healthcare tech, etc etc. Now they are squeezing the last money juice out the cloud acquisitions because the market is saturated with viable competitors. They will do the same with AI and Quantum Computing in the future.
It is a viable strategy if you are big enough. Broadcom, and before them, Symantec are other examples.
Profit > Innovation
Are you saying IBM isn’t innovative? Dude, they like, effectively invented computers. The stuff they are doing with power10, their big mainframe systems and quantum computers (which I’m not sure if you are aware, aren’t profitable at all). If anything I would say IBM is the company that is innovating, nobody else is getting nearly as far in the future as they are.
No, they have some really awesome stuff, and they were driving to the edge in a lot of interesting areas. I just mean that they lose sight of the possible whenever the grim reaper of quarterly profits comes around. When MBAs run the show instead of engineers. Same thing happened with the Boeing 737 MAX. In my opinion short sighted drive for profit will almost always win in today’s publicly traded spaces.
This is a very narrow opinion and obviously doesn’t cover every scenario at every company, or even all of IBM. Just one person’s opinion on the internet.
fwiw i work with a bunch of former ibmers.
super super nice people who are crazy smart.
but think something in their brains got wired differently when they worked there - they just build all sorts of amazing stuff without thinking about the strategy for it. who will use it, in what scenarios, how will it be supported once interest surpasses cycles of the creator.
not all indicative of the companies history or current reputation but interesting to see at the micro level
Every large company have this aspect, but they usually have this group as part of research. These research projects are unbridled, with no concern for business. The group is measured by the number of patents they file. A separate group then picks through the research output and figure out how to monetize it.
I suspect that they’re a very slow-moving corporate culture and likely mostly interested in value extraction over a long term. It’s a general opposite of move-fast-and-break-stuff.
You don’t expect IBM to provide paradigm-breaking sexy new things, you expect them to build boring corporate stuff that you support for decades and gradually crystallizes because you can’t break specific use cases.
It takes a specific kind to get excited about that.
The whole MCA and PS/2 fiasco is probably at its heart them overplaying their hand on a business level. The PS/2s were cleverly designed machines and MCA was impressive for a 1987 design, but they fell flat because the business guys wanted to use it to rebottle the genie that Compaq released.
I’ve heard that OS/2 got hamstrung by IBM promising too much business-wise. They sold 286s with the promise it would run OS/2, but the 286 was a pretty bad platform to juggle DOS software and more modern multitasking on, so it was jankier and more incomplete than it needed to be. Even before the era of direct competition, OS/2 had a rep of being expensive and aekward.
I wonder if it would have fared better if the MS-IBM partnership had started 3 yesrs later and targeted the 386 from day 1.
Anecdotally, every interaction I or many friends had with IBM left a “is this the 90s” taste.
It feels super disorganized but it’s still a big corp, “simple” dev position hard require a degree (like, their system just wouldn’t let a friend submit their application because they didn’t press the checkmark lol) - usually it’s not a hard requirement in our local market. I’m still waiting 5 years later for the VP of the BU I was interviewing at to return from his vacation to “approve my hire” LOL (for all concerned I found work at a different company… But still amusing to think about that guy spending 5 years in vacation…).
Just examples, but feels like there’s some internal process/management failures higher up the food chain. Their devs create pretty innovative things, then nothing is actually done with that lol.
