They sell things they can’t deliver, they never drive technology forward unless you pay them to, and then they get angry and confused when you pick someone who didn’t stand still over them.

Back in the day, almost everything we did ran in IBM mainframes, next year we’ll be signing away our last contract on any of our 500 different IT systems with IBM and we’ll never do business with them again if it can be avoided.

And that’s saying a lot, because I think most companies who sell software to the public sector are terrible leeches, but IBM always took it one bit further and never understood why no one loved them.

I mean, they still don’t get why nobody wants watson, and keep on trying to sell it, never realising that what it does for BI is stuff we automated almost a decade ago, and what it does for deep learning is so much worse than some of the smaller setups that you can scale by running them on AWS or Azure ( probably other clouds as well, but being public sector we’re in Azure and AWS ).

I think this will be absolutely terrible for redhat, and we’re already making exit strategies for the two jboss setups we have for when it becomes necessary in a few years.

IBM lays off employees by the thousands every year, paying only statutory minimum severance packages. This has been extensively covered by the trade press, e.g. El Reg. It is anything but a guarantee of stability, infact it is the opposite!