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}
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
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.
What does IBM’s work on Watson mean for their position in AI?
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.
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.
I worked with someone who moved their entire workload into notes, email, spreadsheets, browsing, embedded sametime, you name it he used notes for it.
Didn’t IBM create the punchcard machines the nazis used to catalogue Jews? Genocide counts, right?
Yes, they did. And yes, it does.
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.
Exactly 🥹
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.
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
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.
Eh, they can do what Google did with Android. It’s open source in name only.
No it isn’t.
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.
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.
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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.
