Hacker News Reader

Comment by crash-universe | Hacker News Reader

Someone must have thought about this. PMs, Directors, lots of people involved in putting this together.

I wonder what their target customer is. They must have analyzed and projected this. I'm genuinely interested.

There is so much business software out there and ecosystems that have evolved around it. Systems still running cobol on IBM mainframes; or, more "modern" stacks like Java apps running in IBM websphere. There are relatively small numbers of HN reading folk that went to some of the best CS programs and/or work(ed) at FANG caliber companies (whatever you call them now). The rest of the software engineer types are a diverse crowd and turning to IBM Bob might be more natural than some creepy looking orange starfish offering. That's my hypothesis anyway.

And the solution to those businesses is not more IBM software, but Claude Code converting it to Go/Rust/Typescript in a few weeks.

I have a feeling that if they already thought like that, they wouldn’t be using IBM legacy stacks in 2026.

A lot of IBM customers have moved to RH Openshift and running their java there.

Good point. Maybe I'm still puzzled by the coins choice. But it makes sense that they may trust that ecosystem more and an IBM offering since they have a lot of business there. Thank you!

I'm sure tons of companies have retainer spends with IBM for software, hardware, consulting, etc., and this is another way for their corporate clients to spend down / increase their retainers faster

That IBM Z skill locked behind an "enterprise only" pay point would be a good starting point.

See: Kiro by AWS

Reply on news.ycombinator.com