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?
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.
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.
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.