The IBM DB2 connector from Node-Red would slowly and surely leak resources and finally disconnect after a couple of days. Took us weeks to figure out what was going on. No one could help us. No way to debug things.
Would recommend it for kids as a playground. Would recommend IBM cloud (bluemix) for kids as an expensive playground. Would not recommend either for production.
IBM is following the hallowed path of GE: lose your core business and use buybacks to prop-up dividends and the share price. Swapping equity for debt makes sense when interest rates are at 5,000 year lows.
A cartoon character who runs off a cliff can keep going for a while, but when they look down, to see business declining and interest rates rising, they fall rather rapidly, as gravity takes over from leverage.
I don't think Big Blue will survive the 2019/20 depression.
But in the early 90's things got fast enough. Little old PC's, in particular, could crunch things that the mainframes choked on 25 years prior, so companies started buying lower margin PC's instead of the mainframes. Companies like Microsoft and Dell were in the positions of power that IBM used to hold.
So Lou Gerstner came along and said, "Let's transition into a services company. Customers will pay recurring revenue to have IBM solve their problems on IBM hardware that the company buys or leases. And the sky's the limit on how much we can bill in services!"
As an aside; this happened to Qwest (now CenturyLink). IBM literally bought Qwests IT staff and leased them back to Qwest. I know someone who was part of that. It was a nightmare. The level of bureaucracy that IBM added was obscene. It took weeks of emails back and forth and meetings just to get approval to change a password.
Within about 15 years those hardware margins got so thin that IBM sold off its PC business to Lenovo and doubled down on services. And, as one commenter mentioned, they now had a direct incentive to make things even more complicated so that their services team could bill out even more.
Do they overcomplicate on purpose? I honestly don't think so. I think it's an emergence effect of a) trying to do things too fast without thinking them through, b) the aforementioned bureaucracy which is crippling, and c) offshoring a lot and which doesn't always get you the best quality. They still have a semblance of "Nobody ever got fired for going with IBM" working in their favor and they know it so nobody in a position of authority corrects that emergence effect, if they're even able to see it happening at all.