IBM the company is like an iceberg.
The R&D and open source contributions are the tip. And the other 90% is services revenue.
And most people's experience with IBM services isn't positive.
The R&D and open source contributions are the tip. And the other 90% is services revenue.
And most people's experience with IBM services isn't positive.
It may be more useful to view IBM as a collection of fiefdoms rather than a single, focused, entity. Yes, the money all goes into one pot at the end of the day, but there's large variance across organizations within IBM.
That said, from what I can tell OSS that goes into the IBM machine doesn't usually come out the other side improved. I worry for the health of CentOS/RHEL/Fedora under IBM's leadership. My desktop and server OS of choice, with a few brief forays into other territories along the way, has been from Red Hat for 23 years. I'd hate to lose Fedora or CentOS, or see them stagnate. Red Hat has been among the most steadfast in their support of Open Source software, as well...so, there's a real risk of the kernel, Gnome, and other OSS core infrastructure suffering, because Red Hat is a major contributor to those projects.
I don't think it'll be sudden. It usually takes years for projects to become clearly worse for having come under IBM's purview. Red Hat is large itself, and will probably take years to be fully assimilated and homogenized into IBM's lukewarm culture of mere competence with regard to their Open Source contributions.
Things started with "IBM loves you, and pledges to stay hands off and help you do what you're already doing", continued to "We're going to replace a few management positions with folks from IBM" and "We're changing some benefits, titles, and procedures to better align with The IBM Way", and finally ended up with "You aren't meeting your sales targets, so we're going to overhaul your leadership."
Admittedly, this was a much smaller company than Red Hat. But they were profitable before being bought and had a respected product and growth.
But, IBM is a different beast. They make a lot of money on Open Source, too, but they're not a software company. It's ancillary to their core competency, and so when software goes in, it seems to eventually become a meandering bloated and bulbous creature without a clear purpose or direction, and most of the really smart people seem to leave within a year or two.
Not in terms of technical ability; they are about equivalent. But for everything else, IBM is just a lame copy.
Supposedly both companies had bids out on Sun, with Sun's leadership believing Oracle's tighter business operations would result in fewer layoffs and ultimately less harm to the staff then at Sun. If true, that seems like it mostly turned out to be extremely naive, since Oracle immediately locked down whatever they thought they could sell and cut off everything else.
To be honest the only way Red Hat selling out would've been more disheartening would've been if it was Oracle making the rounds again. I think I'd be happier about an MS acquisition than IBM. Weird, sad stuff.
This is standard practice for almost every acquisition. If the startup didn't want to be part of the IBM way of doing things they shouldn't have agreed to be acquired by IBM.
In fact the rare situation was the Facebook "acquire but treat more like an independent subsidiary" model. And even that didn't last all that long.
In this situation, I don't think it makes sense to think of an organization as a single, monolithic entity. In this context, the only sane way to think about Red Hat is as over 12,000 employees, plus I-don't-know-how-many shareholders.
Only a very small number of those "agreed to be acquired by IBM". Probably less than 0.1% of them. They are probably also going to be the ones who are going to be the least affected by how IBM operates internally. They've now got FU money, so, as soon as whatever retention agreements they may or may not have signed expire, they'll be prancing out the door.
Everyone else probably knows very little about it - the linked press release indicates that this is probably a surprise for about 12,000 Red Hat employees, most of whom won't be getting any additional details until tomorrow's all hands meeting.
Ultimately in a decision like this the board has only one entity to consider -shareholders , if they believe the deal will create more value to shareholders they should consider it
Value maybe subjective Of course shareholders could be against for ideological reasons and prefer not take the money, that doesn't seem to be the case here.
It took a few months for them to realise their startup was going to languish completely within IBM, and their destiny for the 2 years after acquisition was to sit by quietly and wait for their payout, while looking for the next thing to do.
Any time & effort they put into trying to grow their startup product's future within IBM was going to be a waste of everyone's time. This was a hard lesson for them to learn post-acquisition, but I think the money in their bank accounts 2 years down the track will help them get over it
IBM sucks.
It's like they are using cloud pricing as a reference for dedicated servers. We run dozens of dedicated servers, and using the cloud would be 10x the cost. Amazon at least has a culture of passing on cost savings to customers.
There was a problem with a server, and I needed to connect to the console. That involved using a VPN, then downloading a Java applet with a very specific (obsolete) version of Java. The applet didn't support copy and paste, and frequently repeated keys. Try typing in a 16 digit randomly generated root password by hand with your keyboard duplicating keypresses. Linode can offer a console over SSH, why not IBM?
Screw IBM.
Ah, yes, Lantronix Spider. My current colo still uses that old bastard. It's the only reason I still have Java on one of my laptops. And, now that our colocated servers are getting old and crotchety, I'm beginning to think it's not worth it and considering moving out to some cloud-based thing (but to keep costs down we'd need to reimplement a lot of stuff, because "big box with a bunch of services running" is outrageously expensive on the major cloud-based virtual machines, compared to ~$100/month to stick a fat server in a rack and get a gigabit pipe plugged into it).
In their latest quarter https://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM-3Q18-Earnings-Chart... $4.1b of revenue came from Cognitive Solutions (mostly solutions software) at a 76% gross profit while their global business services with the same revenue had a gross profit of only 29.8%.
By the way, they spend $1.3b on RD&E while their net income is $2.7b.
I previously commented in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18322772 with a bit more context on how I view this deal.
...but then again, many enterprise solutions that are incredibly over-engineered, slow and costly are still alive and kicking, so who knows.
[1] https://www.ibm.com/watson/advantage-reports/getting-started...
None of them shipped.
IBM sucks, and this is the worst news I've heard in a very long time.
> And most people's experience with IBM services isn't positive.
I've migrated a site from WAS to JBoss. The support experience is night and day. WAS on IBM OS on IBM hardware not working? Pay a four-figure-per-day consult to be told that's just how WAS works on that platform, buy more hardware.
Same application on JBoss, problems with performance, RH dropped experts in as part of the support contract.
This is not a one-off in my experience. RH, Microsoft, other vendors I deal with treat a lot of these things as covered by your enterprise support contracts. IBM treat it as a chance to upsell a services engagement, and maybe pitch that the work should be outsourced, too.
I was under the impression that OP objected to their revenue being 90% from services regardless, that's why I commented.
That does not reflect my or my friends experience. Once one gets beyond the local representatives, service for me always was exceptional.
IBM in general seems fairly aware of who their best teams are, and you're probably not going to get one of those teams. (Unless you're a huge account and/or the project is in dire straits)
Their software support is something else. I haven't had to use IBM tooling in a while, but back when I did, everything they sold was absolutely fucking terrible (DB2, RAD, WebSphere, Clear Case, Tivoli) compared to many open source equivalents.
The only reason people buy this rubbish is because they're in an old company (bank, insurance, etc.) that has relied on it for ages and don't care about the inefficiency or cost.
Over 20 years in contracting that's been my experience too, utterly lazy, awful software - awful UI, continuous license issues, buggy, juggernauts of bloat. WSAD (Eclipse + Websphere plugins) was easily my worst experience with an IDE, ClearCase easily my worst experience with a SCCS etc. I pity people that have to work with any of it 9-5.
The banks and insurance companies I've worked at had support contracts, but they were useless - you more often than not just had to suck it up.