Comment by LeftHandPath | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LeftHandPath | Hacker News Reader

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Its funny how differently people probably perceive them based on what tech they work with. At work, I use their IBM i / AS400 on the daily. At school, I work with IBM Q for research. I would contend that IBM is one of the most important players in QC / NISQ today, and still notable for their mainframes and things like zOS. And what about RHEL?

According to their Q4-FY2020 earnings report, they did $2.5bn in revenue from their systems segment last year (which includes IBM Z, Power, and OS's). But their most important segments are Global Technology Services ($6.6bn revenue) and "Cloud & Cognitive Software Segment" ($6.8bn revenue). GTS is cloud infrastructure + support, while C&CSS includes "Cloud & Data Platforms", "Cognitive Applications", and transactions processing platforms...

I'm not sure what exposure the commenter has had to IBM, but it's a bit of a culture shock to hear someone saying they're not important.

I’m 41, and know all those things, and my father’s company ran for most of my life on AS/400. But they replaced those systems over a decade ago. My whole professional career IBM has been trying to commit corporate suicide in a stumbling awkward way. It’s a testament to how long you can keep spending down brand credibility. I struggle to call them important today. Maybe historically interesting. But not important.

So a Fortune 50 company is “unimportant”? In what way?

Maybe is more irrelevant, than unimportant

Because they're only predictive of what's worked in the past, and works okay enough to ride the entropy in the present — not what will progress really well in the future.

IBM was the Google or Microsoft of the 80s. Like HP, in realigning the company to survive they destroyed what made them great. I worked with many smart IBM folks… without exception they were laid off or driven out to meet some random metric.

The Red Hat acquisition and spin out of the services garbage might make them more relevant again.

IBM was the entire IT industry of 1950s, 1960s, and most of 1970s. It is hard to explain IBM's dominance in today's terms. IBM used to be so dominant that the entire financial industry could not operate without their IBM mainframes and today major banks still run on IBM.

The downside (to IBM) was that Wall Street decided "never again" and fought hard to prevent another company of IBM's scale from reappearing.

IBM made RHEL?

I should have been clearer. IBM acquired RedHat in 2020 (https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-closes-la...), and it looks like it will be a significant part of their business going forward. It's a really interesting proposition, given IBM's push for open source in enterprise systems (https://www.ibm.com/opensource/).

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