Hacker News Reader

Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

I didn't know IBM still had money to throw around like that. What do they even do these days? Who are their customers?

This type of comment appears here every time the name IBM shows up, but it is more symptomatic, of the bubble a part of HN lives on.

Think every core IT infra of most of the developed world countries, most of the ebanking and core messaging infra of your large banks and insurance companies, plus billions per year in consulting services revenue.

https://www.ibm.com/products

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IBM_products

It is more than IBM used to be a big name in areas where hackers would be expected to be. They have left all those behind though. there are lots of other companies that none of us would recognize that are big, but IBM is a name that we all know as once somewhat important who now are not.

Uhm, the term “hacker” in this context, is, itself, just a coded way of saying “cool developer in the same circles as me”.

Again, HN users are in a bubble, and HN users think that they’re very trendy.

Right. If you are in the HN bubble, then 30 years ago IBM was a big name in computing as the inventor of the PC, OS/2, maker of a great keyboard, and a bunch of weird systems we never touched. They sold their PC and keyboard businesses, and let OS/2 die. We think some of those weird systems still exist, but those never were very relevant unless you had to work on them.

HN users are trendy. If you didn't grow up in the 1990s or before though you may not remember just how picked on this type of crowd was. Now while we are never exactly the "in" crowd, we are respected, being a "nerd" or "geek" is now an acceptable thing. We have come a long way and that is enough trendy enough for us.

Yep. My dad sold IBM server software for most of his career. His customers were banks, railways, and governments.

I worked for IBM in early 2010s and Universities were also one of their customers for business analytics.

Indeed, there's also a whole world of B2B software which you may be almost entirely unaware of if you've spent your whole career in consumer-facing web/app development.

a lot of banks still use the main frame. IBM got out of pc/server game but not the main frame. IBM is a big player in that game.

Airlines, as well. COBOL is still running business and flight critical services.

This may be a slightly more clear wiki link, especially looking at post 2000 -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

They bought Red Hat in 2019 for $34B, which means their customers are at a minimum every RHEL customer.

https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-closes-la...

They did $14.5 billion dollars in revenue in Q1, with a 54% gross margin, split across software, consulting and infrastructure:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-releases-first-quarter-re...

IBM had ~$14B cash to start the year.

Additionally, you don't need the full purchase price in cash to buy the company. You can do leveraged buyouts, etc.

IBM M&A person: "We'd like to buy you in all IBM stock! <jazz hands>"

Hopefully someone at HashiCorp: "Hell no, cash please"

IBM stock is basically cash. Limited growth potential, very stable, fat dividend.

Press release says it's all cash at $35/sh using cash-on-hand for the purchase.

Ugh, and have you actually looked at IBM’e share price? Or is it this because IBM isn’t cool to you? A bit rich for a community that’ll go work for shares in some dinky web app startup.

Yes I did, it was overextended by about 30 points yesterday

As far as I can tell, the vast majority of the universe is completely incompetent with IT, but needs a lot of boring things done.

If you're a shipyard, an oil company, a bank, an automaker, etc. you still need software to manage things like inventory, employees, logistics, and similar, and you have zero expertise to do it in-house. They also have zero expertise to find a qualified vendor.

IBM is a safe bet.

That's a huge market.

IBM is essentially a large bank with a side business of tech. IBM is known for financially complex deals that are highly lucrative. They make their money by taking advantage of inefficiencies in the largest enterprises purchasing and technology teams.

Just guessing - large corporate bespoke software / integrations projects?

IBM did ~$62 billion in revenue last year, with a ~$7.5 billion net income. They employ ~280,000 people.

I think they can find a few billions lying around, without having to turn the sofa cushions.

Other than a period around 2012-13, IBM's market cap is higher than it's ever been.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com