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.
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.
Well, there are exceptions, but I can remember one…
They bought Red Hat, now that company software is going 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.
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-source-response-gitcentosorg-changes
From that link,
Despite what’s currently being said about Red Hat, we make our hard work readily accessible to non-customers. Red Hat uses and will always use an open source development model. When we find a bug or write a feature, we contribute our code upstream. This benefits everyone in the community, not just Red Hat and our customers.
We don’t simply take upstream packages and rebuild them. At Red Hat, thousands of people spend their time writing code to enable new features, fixing bugs, integrating different packages and then supporting that work for a long time - something that our customers and partners need.
This is about the hours and late nights we spend backporting a patch to code that is now 5 to 10 years old or older; at any given time, we are supporting 3-4 major release streams, while applying patches and backports to all. Additionally, when we develop fixes for issues in RHEL, we don’t just apply them to RHEL - they are applied upstream first, to projects like Fedora, CentOS Stream or the kernel project itself, and we then backport them. Maintaining and supporting an operating system for 10 years is a Herculean task - there‘s enormous value in the work we do.
We will always send our code upstream and abide by the open source licenses our products use, which includes the GPL.
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.
I had heard of that, but was just too discouraged to try it at the time. Now that I’ve had some time to recover I should give it a look. Adapting my code to use it doesn’t look like it would take much effort.
Thanks!
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.
