IBM felt to me like the last holdout of the shiny shoed salesmen when I briefly worked for them. Before the internet and big tech companies with leaders who were theoretically technical there were the companies dominated by salesmen because selling was the critical part.

I imagine that getting a board to spend a lot of money on some project is hard and you need the support of the kind of people that can influence board members.

So to get your project past a lot of people who basically don't respect or believe in nerds you had to hire a company with non-nerdy salesmen to back you up.

i.e. the entire thing is social. And just because the nerds (us) have trounced them for the last N years, it doesn't mean that the world has converted into 100% nerd. Shiny shoed salesmen are probably still quite necessary.

I joined as part of an acquisition. I am probably biased but they spent a year making the product multilingual and not fixing anything. Everyone knows the name of the Open Source knock-off of that product but not the name of the product anymore. It's probably still there taking almost no investment of effort.

So I got the impression that IBM is a company where software goes to live out its old age and die. I think of Redhat (perhaps unfairly) with their super complicated Linux distribution which must be a nightmare to maintain because it does so many things and needs to keep long compatibility guarantees. I'm not expecting any innovation whatsoever from them. Perhaps this is very unfair and ignorant of me. I'm happy to be corrected.