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IBM seems to mainly grow by buying companies and milking support dollars, while keeping a skeleton crew for the product.

There's also all the AI hype after Watson.

They don't have much hardware left outside of the Z-Machine mainframes which are pretty cool.

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The POWER systems are pretty neat. IBM is one of the last standing commercial Unix vendors w/AIX.

Don’t they dabble in quantum computing too?

They were also on the forefront of the "blockchain revolution" several years back.

There's worthwhile research coming out of IBM once in a blue moon, but by and large, they seem to be chasing PR trends.

i remember reading about how IBM was consistently granted the most patents by the USPTO for over 25 years; this thread made me take a look and turns out Samsung bested them last year. and, of course, IBM spun it as a shift to "focusing" and that they did it "on purpose". feels like a sign of the times

They also stopped paying bonuses for patent work. Not surprising it dropped off thereafter.

Yeah, but that's probably far less profitable than even their AI business

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