I have to agree. All IBM is asking for is to hit certain numbers. Now, those numbers might be short sighted and unrealistic, but in my experience the operational decisions were still coming from inside Red Hat, at least through the middle of last year when I left. It doesn't matter whether IBM or Wall Street is demanding double-digit growth numbers every quarter, the end result is the same. Despite a really strong push by a lot of people inside the company to put culture first, in the end, a demand for unsustainable growth is going to wreck any culture, no matter how strong.

It's exactly this. When I worked at IBM some years ago via another acquisition, this is the same pattern I saw. Senior leadership -- people who had been at the prior company for nearly two decades -- were the ones gladly steering it aground in order to do what IBM wanted.

You can see this with Red Hat - the Chairman and the CEO are both long-time RHers. Were they just the opportunists?

All the talk about running RH as an independent subsidiary was either smoke and mirrors or the IBM management style has infected the leadership at Red Hat.