Why IBM got a reputation of destroying everything they touch?
After the Red Hat mess I see many people saying IBM destroys everything they touch, but I can't think of many examples of it. Can you tell me what else IBM has destroyed after acquiring it, or something good that they themselves developed and then ruined it with stupid corporate choices?
IBM bought the Weather Underground. It had a set of developer APIs that allowed small-scale apps to make use of their data. As soon as IBM bought them the APIs were changed and replaced with a set priced to be affordable only to other mega-corporations.
It killed a tiny little free app I had built around it. The real irony is that I took a deep breath, looked around, and adapted the app to use the Dark Skies API instead. A few years later Apple bought Dark Skies and killed off its API too. {heavy sigh}
You're probably already aware of this, but now Pirate Weather (http://pirateweather.net/en/latest/) offers a Dark Sky style API. I honestly don't get amazing accuracy from it for my area, but it's not awful.
There has been a distinct difference with weather underground since IBM bought it. Mostly in the app performance, but for my money there is no better weather app in terms of accuracy and forecast.
My job relies on the weather and I have converted many people over the years.
Something about that story sounds awfully familiar...
I've talked about it over in that other place. :-)
Nice to see you here!
I was part of an acquisition, company was performing well against bigger players and IBM came in and threw a load of money at the owners.
Once we completed the transref of business we were paid massive retention bonuses, managers got company cars etc.
Not one sale of the product was made in the next 6 years and the business unit closed down. Previous CEO founded a competitor when his non compete clause ended and the customer base IBM had bought moved.
This is not an isolated occurrence.
They are driven by quarterly earnings. No company can be successful long term when focusing on maximum profit in the next three months. So they buy a company at the top and ride the money wave until they aren’t profitable, then sell the name or IP to another company, lather, rinse, repeat.
They did this with PCs, Storage, big data, Healthcare tech, etc etc. Now they are squeezing the last money juice out the cloud acquisitions because the market is saturated with viable competitors. They will do the same with AI and Quantum Computing in the future.
It is a viable strategy if you are big enough. Broadcom, and before them, Symantec are other examples.
Profit > Innovation
What does IBM's work on Watson mean for their position in AI?
Are you saying IBM isn't innovative? Dude, they like, effectively invented computers. The stuff they are doing with power10, their big mainframe systems and quantum computers (which I'm not sure if you are aware, aren't profitable at all). If anything I would say IBM is the company that is innovating, nobody else is getting nearly as far in the future as they are.
Yes, they've been innovative years ago, but I feel like they haven't been releasing any disruptive tech for a while now
No, they have some really awesome stuff, and they were driving to the edge in a lot of interesting areas. I just mean that they lose sight of the possible whenever the grim reaper of quarterly profits comes around. When MBAs run the show instead of engineers. Same thing happened with the Boeing 737 MAX. In my opinion short sighted drive for profit will almost always win in today’s publicly traded spaces.
This is a very narrow opinion and obviously doesn’t cover every scenario at every company, or even all of IBM. Just one person’s opinion on the internet.
they like, effectively invented computers
Momentum on past cred is part of their schtick, for sure.
IBM buys companies because it wants something the company has and it's happy to throw away (sorry, divest) the bits it's not interested in. That's it. The people in the bought company, or their customers, may feel that the things that they valued and that made them precious have been destroyed, but IBM didn't value them enough to preserve them.
Have you ever used this thing called "Lotus Notes" before?
Oh dear God.
Sametime is equally horrendous.
That’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time…
Back when emojis were novel in the corporate environment, I always questioned who at IBM decided a sheep emoji was a valuable addition. I mean, I used it in messages, but probably not in the way IBM intended....
Triggered!
Former Domino admin here. My last certification was for Notes/Domino 5, so it's been a while.
Yeah, it sucked on the back end too. There were a few good things about it, but there are a lot reasons why Notes/Domino lost to Exchange, SQL Server, and Oracle. Mainly that those other products sucked less.
I worked with someone who moved their entire workload into notes, email, spreadsheets, browsing, embedded sametime, you name it he used notes for it.
Thank God they sold Thinkpad, then...
Tho I'm not so sure if Lenovo is doing any better...
You mean the Chinese company that put keyloggers into their firmware, said sorry we didn't mean to when they were called out for it, but still didn't remove it?
Yeah... I'm gonna go with not much better.
Didn’t IBM create the punchcard machines the nazis used to catalogue Jews? Genocide counts, right?
Yes, they did. And yes, it does.
OS/2 was poised to be a really awesome operating system. Bad decisions and poor marketing really eff'ed that up. We could have had a full GUI, multi-user OS for consumers like 10 good years earlier than we did and it likely would have curbed Microsoft's monopoly.
Solidifying a far stronger IBM monopoly in the process
IBM is a law firm wrapped in a tech company.
Source - 10+ years working with them and watching them keep their claws dug in with management.
IBM started in my town and destroyed the whole town. They dumped toxic chemicals all over the place and then sold off and left this place a ghost town.
I think you spelled DuPont incorrectly
Ibm has a reputation for destroying everything they touch thanks to one thing.
Profit at every cost.
Never trust a big corp, never expect anything from them except the intent to screw you. They'll be expecting a thank you.
fwiw i work with a bunch of former ibmers.
super super nice people who are crazy smart.
but think something in their brains got wired differently when they worked there - they just build all sorts of amazing stuff without thinking about the strategy for it. who will use it, in what scenarios, how will it be supported once interest surpasses cycles of the creator.
not all indicative of the companies history or current reputation but interesting to see at the micro level
Every large company have this aspect, but they usually have this group as part of research. These research projects are unbridled, with no concern for business. The group is measured by the number of patents they file. A separate group then picks through the research output and figure out how to monetize it.
I suspect that they're a very slow-moving corporate culture and likely mostly interested in value extraction over a long term. It's a general opposite of move-fast-and-break-stuff.
You don't expect IBM to provide paradigm-breaking sexy new things, you expect them to build boring corporate stuff that you support for decades and gradually crystallizes because you can't break specific use cases.
It takes a specific kind to get excited about that.
The whole MCA and PS/2 fiasco is probably at its heart them overplaying their hand on a business level. The PS/2s were cleverly designed machines and MCA was impressive for a 1987 design, but they fell flat because the business guys wanted to use it to rebottle the genie that Compaq released.
I've heard that OS/2 got hamstrung by IBM promising too much business-wise. They sold 286s with the promise it would run OS/2, but the 286 was a pretty bad platform to juggle DOS software and more modern multitasking on, so it was jankier and more incomplete than it needed to be. Even before the era of direct competition, OS/2 had a rep of being expensive and aekward.
I wonder if it would have fared better if the MS-IBM partnership had started 3 yesrs later and targeted the 386 from day 1.
The whole PS/2 & OS/2 fiasco is probably what pushed the once great IBM away from hardware and software production into managed services and consulting which is where they make their money now. They are a contract sales driven company. Quarterly sales targets & bonuses is a good way to motivate the sales team. The problem is that IBM concider everything other than sales an expense to be minimized. They do not invest. They market. "Watson" did not represent AI innovation. It was just a marketing tool.
Anecdotally, every interaction I or many friends had with IBM left a "is this the 90s" taste.
It feels super disorganized but it's still a big corp, "simple" dev position hard require a degree (like, their system just wouldn't let a friend submit their application because they didn't press the checkmark lol) - usually it's not a hard requirement in our local market. I'm still waiting 5 years later for the VP of the BU I was interviewing at to return from his vacation to "approve my hire" LOL (for all concerned I found work at a different company... But still amusing to think about that guy spending 5 years in vacation...).
Just examples, but feels like there's some internal process/management failures higher up the food chain. Their devs create pretty innovative things, then nothing is actually done with that lol.
IBM bought a an innovative SAN company, and sold these products for a while as their XIV brand (no relation to my username!). Was pretty much superior in most ways to their home-grown SAN offerings.
They killed the entire line off, after the 3rd gen product; about all that remains of it is the management UI, they butchered it and applied it to their own SANs. But the UI was only a small part of what made XIV great.
The original XIV founder went on to found Infinidat, which basically carries on where XIV left off, it was a great migration to their hardware!
Unfortunately by destroying every startup they touch. The squeeze the money out of absolutely everything while not investing in it.
The only people that can afford something of theirs and are dumb enough to buy it are fortune 500s.
Well, there are exceptions, but I can remember one...
They bought Red Hat, now that company software is going closed source.
It legally cannot be made closed source.
IBM/Redhat only HAS to provide their source code to paying customers. That is what they are doing. They will also refuse to do business with entities that use the source to release the source or use it in a derivative distro.
This violates the spirit of open-source. IBM benefits from the work of thousands of programmers for free, but refuses to reciprocate. They are de facto close sourcing their code.
You can also bet of the fact that IBM will decrease their development of Redhat (more layoffs) over time as they emphasize short term profits.
I guess it's more: they going as closed source as they legally can.
Eh, they can do what Google did with Android. It's open source in name only.
No it isn't.
I still can't believe they sold ThinkPad to Lenovo. I suppose we can't have a nice thing from IBM anymore?
Having used PC for a long time, I'd say... The PC 😁
MCA bus for instance
Ancient history.
The numbers on forearms used to keep track of holocaust prisoners used by the nazis.... was a proprietary system developed by IBM for the nazis. Does that count?
OS/2 was poised to be a really awesome operating system. Bad decisions and poor marketing really eff'ed that up. We could have had a full GUI, multi-user OS for consumers like 10 good years earlier than we did and it likely would have curbed Microsoft's monopoly.
Years ago, my employer at the time collaborated with IBM on a plan to develop the first 64-bit Unix when such a thing was still a ways off. and we did it. But then IBM chased no sales, generated no revenue, suggesting the 2-year effort was just a boondoogle my employer had to financially foot without dying, then held on to the source in a vault and that would be that....
.. except they allegedly released some private source code to the world and had to build an entire astroturf 'news' site to defend their position to excitable hippies who gladly took up the flag, and when my employer died from the costly litigation, they were also hated as well. Lie back and think of England, I guess. #pamelaWasAPlant
Like all the big corporations IBM has bought a lot of small competitors in the past. Red Hat was the only name widely known to the public because IBM targets are software tools for business or the backend of the enterprise infrastructure.
Here there is a list of all their acquisitions.
Meanwhile from the beginning of the years 2000s they decided they wanted to become a consultancy company and rely more on external developers (especially from Indian companies). Internal developers slowly became demoralised in the middle of repeated rounds of redundancies, the quality of their services declined and they lost a lot of clients.
You may see IBM as an innovative company, a little bit for their past reputation and a little bit for the recent advanced projects they announced. But although they have some very advanced research centers the bulk of their work is the one they carry out on the client sites. That part of their work is lagging behind. At the end of the '90s you could find many big companies around the world that handed over to IBM almost all their IT systems. Now it does not happen any more. They are one of the many providers.