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Comment by admax88qqq | Hacker News Reader

I think you two are looking at two sides of the same coin.

IBM has stalled due to poor business decisions. But those decisions are a symptom of bureaucratic system of IBM and those who know how to navigate it.

You can't divorce the actions of a company from the people who constitute the company.

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It's true you can't disconnect the decisions of the business from the ones making those decisions. But you also can't hire your way out of current problems, especially hiring lower in the organization and hope for change. To completely reboot a company's decision-making culture by way of importing new people without a complete reboot of leadership is very difficult. And even if you could completely replace everyone in the organization from the very top to the very bottom (which is an impossibility), you're still left with the legacy of existing customers and technology as well as your brand and reputation and relationships. Simply put, changing people is not a solution to these problems. People and decision-making relate to each other, but as time goes on, the ability for one to impact the other without regard to the existing impedance in the organization and market is limited. This is part of the Innovator's Dilemma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma)

They could flip the relationship with Red Hat and let them run the show

Totally agree. You have to replace the old school decision makers embedded throughout the company to have any hope of changing culture and direction.

Yes exactly. The symptoms are mainly causes by the posse of old timers in the leadership, which BTW remains after Whitehurst, the only hope of change, left. This was one of the motivators of me leaving as well, as I didn't see any chance of real change in the company.

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