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Comment by bmicklea | Hacker News Reader

I respectfully disagree - I'm a Red Hatter so you can take that for what it's worth. To me the 34B buys IBM the real estate in the open hybrid cloud market which Red Hat has built up in the last 5 years. That is part of a large and rapidly growing market. If IBM interferes with Red Hat they will likely squander the value of what we've built. If they foster what Red Hat did to win that critical ground then their 34B could stand to increase substantially.

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Respectfully, I think you are being overly optimistic. I worked at a company acquired by HP several years ago. They bought us because we were beating them, and yet, they still thought they knew better, and intefered. You can guess how things ended up.

I am certain IBM will think they know better than Red Hat, and will intefere. It is in their culture. The HPs and IBMs of the world no longer innovate. They acquire innovation and sqaunder it.

34billion is a lot of money to mess around with so hopefully they will at least thing twice before trying anything too dramatic, plus Jim Whitehurst (Red Hat CEO) is going to be reporting directly in to Ginni Rometty (IBM CEO) which should help provide some aircover. In the end it will probably depend on a) Red Hat continuing to grow and make money, because why would you kill a golden goose, and b) how good Jim Whitehurst is at the inevitable corporate politics

At that level of a company like IBM, everyone is purely political. The CEO can’t necessarily force specific changes, and has to work with other senior executives who have clauses in their contracts that allow them to exit with huge payoffs if certain job responsibilities are taken away from them. Those senior executives (esp at IBM) have immense power; and will easily be able to kill RedHat by a thousand cuts or just parcel out the talent at the company.

Just poach a few key folks internally from RedHat to lead “strategic initiatives” and backfill their roles with IBM lifers. The culture will degrade accordingly.

I certainly don't want to argue or appear confrontational, but wanted to ask you this:

Have there ever been any situations where the acquisition of a smaller company by a larger one has resulted in the smaller company remaining independent? Or has there been any positives for companies like Red Hat when they get bought?

Usually I hear or read the positive-yet-bland press release talking about how wonderful this is, and how big-corp won't destroy little-corp's culture. Yet a year or less afterwards, I read stories of how everyone in little-corp has been laid off, and now little-corps applications/services are now crap.

I'm a huge Fedora/CentOS/RHEL fan, and use it every opportunity I get. I'm very, very worried that Red Hat will be gutted and defiled until there's nothing left. Which is a very, very bad thing for open source because Red Hat is a huge cornerstone of OSS development and support.

I usually put it this way: "Name one company that was better after a merger."

I've yet to find any affirmative answer.

It's good to have hope, but it's not good to be unrealistic.

Apple/NeXT

Exception that confirms the rule though.

Youtube/Google?

Doubleclick?

Profitable, maybe, but better than before? No.

YouTube's culture and ux have slowly been killed by Google over the years, and the platform is becoming more bland and homogenized as we speak.

I doubt YouTube would have survived the lawsuits that were brewing before they were purchased. And then precedent would have been set against all video sharing sites, so the Internet would have been significantly worse off and streaming and independent content production would have been set back by a decade. I think the Google acquisition was a good thing, even if it means there are ads on videos unless you pay $5/month to remove them.

This an unjustified conclusion if I ever heard one. YouTube was acquired in 2006 by Google. That's 13 years ago.

YouTube has existed for 14 years. It's been Google nearly the entire time it has existed.

Zappos, IMDB, YouTube, Twitch

Pixar / Disney

Marvel / Disney

Facebook / Instagram

EBay/PayPal

Exxon/Mobil

Massive numbers of banking / pharma/ industrial mergers.

I will agree though that I can't think of a tech sector merger at this scale that worked out really well. They seem to work best at the sub $2B level.

Although LinkedIn/Microsoft is looking OK.

What you don't hear about are the dozens of companies Disney has acquired then shut down over the years. Playdom. Tapulous. Junction Point Studios. Fall line Studios. Wideload Games. Propaganda Games. Black Rock Studios.

Or the tragedy of LucasArts, which is one reason I left LucasFilm off the list.

Disney and gaming seem like a match made in heaven, but for some reason it seems like the mouse struggles to perform in that market compared to its unqualified successes in Movies, TV, and theme parks.

Are we talking about financial success, or making quality products? I get that shareholders care about the former, but as hackers we should care about the latter.

Pixar movies have become crappy sequels made to sell toys. Instagram has become an ad infested product that tries to have every feature, resulting in a confused mess. Exxon/Mobil is one of the worst things that could have happened to the planet.

eBay/PayPal is a good one that made product sense.

I’m not big enough of a Marvel fan to judge that one.

"Pixar movies have become crappy sequels made to sell toys."

Not really. Most of what they do isn't sequels, and the ones they do are great. I saw Toy Story in the cinema and loved it. My daughter just saw Toy Story 4 in the cinema and loved it. So...financially successful, and people love the movies - not sure how this is a good example, to be honest (unless the metric is "I don't like it", of course...).

Skype/Microsoft

I bite: NeXT/Apple and Pixar/Disney. I wonder if RedHat management could take over IBM...

Nope they couldn't. Apple acquiring NeXT was to acquire Steve Jobs and making NeXT the foundation of the company.

IBM acquiring RedHat is a way to play in the cloud field, not to change the complete IBM Organisation, which is huge.

I'm not entirely convinced Apple really wanted Steve Jobs back. They really needed an operating system after the failure of Copland though.

If IBM shareholders think that the future of IBM is the cloud, and that RedHat is the cloud at IBM, I would not be entirely surprised for Jim Whitehurst to replace Ginni Rometty a couple years down the road... 100% speculation from very very far away (I don't pay for anything from either IBM or RedHat).

Interesting theory. Based on history and company performance (I don't have sources for this) Rometty's run as CEO has outlasted most expectations. This is definitely an interesting thought

> I usually put it this way: "Name one company that was better after a merger." > I've yet to find any affirmative answer.

> It's good to have hope, but it's not good to be unrealistic.

* HP paid $4.5B for LoadRunner : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Interactive

* HP paid $1.6B for Opsware

* HP paid $1.2B for Palm

* HP paid ELEVEN BILLION for Autonomy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Hewlet...

IBM had a huge push about 20 years ago to spend their resources on Linux, I believe this played a part in Linux beating everything from SCO, Solaris and even AIX and BSD out of the market.

The agency I work at was bought up by the monolithic AKQA, which in turn was bought by the epic proportioned WPP.

At first, that meant our one to four person operation in SF (most are in London) moved from hanging around Google offices to getting a terrible fishbowl in AKQA. Then, right when I joined, they got approved for their own space in the financial district of SF. Since then, they've been expanding rapidly, with basically no input or oversight from AKQA or WPP.

So at least in this case it seems there was no issue.

The company is Potato, by the way.

So far Microsoft hasn't ruined Github. But then Microsoft has been getting smarter over the last decade while IBM has just gotten dumber and dumber.

At the risk of opening up another debate I'd say that GitHub currently looks to be doing better (more releases, more enterprise sales) after Microsoft's purchase than before. I also see them as a model of how to keep a distinct culture alive and grow it inside a larger entity. If GitHub can do it I think Red Hat can too. But only time will tell. Everything at this stage is some form of speculation.

I'm also not optimistic, but I do expect that IBM leadership can understand a balance sheet. Red Hat has almost no IP, given the nature of open source development. They have a few billion in assets [0], tack on a few more for existing client relationships, brand recognition, and future revenues. $34B is a massive premium over that, so what is IBM buying? IBM's people and processes have failed to develop successful cloud strategy, and not for lack of trying. Red Hat's people and processes have succeeded, so presumably that's what they're paying all that money for. I'm hoping it's obvious to IBM that they shouldn't meddle and squander what they've bought.

[0]: https://investors.redhat.com/financial-information/financial...

> Red Hat is a huge cornerstone

Indeed since in another thread recently, folks pointed out that RH had taken over core functions, such as systemd, pulseaudio, dbus, gnome, wayland, significant share of kernel, etc.

Microsoft seems to be doing the acquisition game right. All their recent purchases of indie video game studios have been well met, but that's most likely because of the leadership of Phil Spencer

IBM is large bureaucracy. Large bureaucracy's have a lot of managers.

Managers prioritize their bonuses over long term interests of companies they work for.

It would be strange and/or abnormal (as far as big co. goes), for IBM managers not to try fuck with Read Hat.

They’re IBM, of course they will squander it. How do you think they went from king of the hill to grumbling behemoth that is constantly behind the times?

As someone who has worked at a company like that before I can foresee continual IBM management changes until you get the right combination of buiness minded leadership that will can everything at Redhat that isn’t directly related to developing what they consider obvious money makers.

>If IBM interferes with Red Hat they will likely squander the value of what we've built.

That's an argument why IBM shouldn't interfere, not an argument why IBM won't interfere...

Every company in the world is told they can keep their corporate culture after an acquisition. This never actually happens, or at least I've never seen it. Optimism that they shouldn't screw up Red Hat is just not how large corporatiols operate.

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