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?
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.
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
