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Comment by styeco | Hacker News Reader

Wait, it isn't already? That's absolutely wild to me. It's probably just my biases talking, but I've never had a single employer or client who used anything by IBM, but nearly everyone uses AWS for something.

It's those megacorp whales, isn't it?

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They're comparing AWS revenue to all IBM revenue. IBM is engaged in a number of other areas including fabless semiconductor design.

Note that AWS has around 25k employees while IBM is close to 350k.

I hope to have that much overhead one day.

I live in a town with a sizeable IBM office. The number of tendrils coming out of it is crazy. To the point where everyone knows someone who is employed by IBM.

I wouldn't say it's only megacorps.

Universities have internship courses with IBM, and IBM have both normal and research contracts with the universities. Even tiny universities with less than a hundred students.

All the banks have contracts with IBM. All of them. There are hardware contracts, software contracts, and customised development versions of both of those for the banks.

Most of the schools also have IBM contracts. Not generally customised development, just deployment of prebuilt hardware and preconfigured software. Even the kindergartens do.

All the ISPs have support contracts. They tend to be more secretive about what the contracts are, but from what I hear it's mostly prebuilt hardware and very slightly customised software, and the support contracts are where IBM make the most of the income from the various contracts with the ISPs.

All the hospitals have contracts. Customised hardware contracts, but boring and preconfigured software. However, the support contracts are fairly busy and IBM have a really high turnover in the teams that support the hospitals.

The government buildings, of which we have local, state and federal, all have IBM hardware in them. Some of which has been under active support for three decades. Software wise, though, the government is edging away from IBM due to some recent fuckups that have seen IBM blacklisted for new contracts.

IBM owns Red Hat, you ever heard of those guys?

IBM largely makes their money supporting legacy software, doing services and consulting work, and through Red Hat's software offerings

And selling hardware. Software aside, both POWER and s390x have a niche and are legitimately competitive in terms of performance (although cost is another matter).

IBM is about 25 times bigger than Red Hat.

Because they're raking in huge bucks supporting legacy software and doing services/consulting work. They also turn Red Hat products into IBM revenue through bundling/repackaging it

but have you heard of Kyndryl? :) IBM is like dark cloud market nowadays. No one has any idea what it does but it still makes money somehow

IBM has grown to do a lot more than just computing services. Which is part of the reason why IBM has been struggling to find its way. In this article they’re talking about all IBM revenue, not just computing.

I thought IBM had divested their service part recently, not sure how did that affected their size.

The divesting is in-progress, it hasn't happened yet.

it seems like IBM's future is in divesting itself of a handful of profitable things as one organization.. then selling the IBM name to that organization.. and bankrupting the 'original' organization. otherwise they'll have one big anchor around their neck in perpetuity.

The opposite. New IBM is focused on cloud and hybrid-cloud, whereas NewCo is everything else (consulting, legacy software).

Although I believe mainframes are sticking with IBM. Those are still quite profitable, and you could imagine a "mainframe cloud" for clients that are still dependent on them.

If I am not mistaken they compare AWS (cloud services) with the entire IBM company (cloud services, consultancing business, …).

Which would make it a strange comparison (but ok, it would just emphasize the size of AWS)

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