IBM will likely be sold off in pieces and what’s left, acquired, much like Digital Equipment Corporation and Sun Microsystems. Two once great companies with some brilliant people that had strategic plans that failed to pivot in time for the way the marketplace was going. I loved working for DEC, until we started losing money.
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Fck the Z platform and Fck IBM too. The time is over and it's a load of dinosaur garbage. Where's OS/2 these days ? There will be other alternatives.
Personally, I think the best outcome for "the world" would be to continue to develop new alternatives to the IBM technology stack. For all the technical achievements IBM has made over the years, the Z platform (including IMS, CICS, TPF, DB2, etc.) will continue to be a real PIA to handle in the long term. It's expensive, with lots of historical baggage that requires lots of historical knowledge to manage. It's not easy to gain any knowledge or experience on the platform, for a whole host of reasons...making it difficult to train or even familiarize new developers. Big legacy companies with existing staff can handle the platform, but any new and upcoming companies (ESPECIALLY SMB) will have great difficulty with it.
It's a legacy platform that had its day...but for most use cases it might be better to move on to something else.
Maybe OpenAI could acquire IBM and enhance GPT with Watsonx and all the other WINO PowerPoint-based AI snake oil shitbot products IBM sells to unwitting d-mbasses.
IBM has been in the process of being acquired for the past 15 years, one piece at the time. It started with Ginny the Eagle when she started a fire sale and got rid of one thing after the other.
@m6 who cares about the customer, a lot of folks in Poughkeepsie are winding down long lucrative 35,40,45 year careers with the archaic Z platform and so who cares what IBM does with Z
American or foreign... if you are on Z, you need to be working actively on moving work off the platform. That Z stack is more likely to be sold to HCL than to be nationalized. But even if it stays in IBM for a long time, you have to break the chains that keep you tied to an archaic platform. Obviously, it's hard to get off....but you don't want to be the last customer hanging on.
Dream On
@g7 When I wrote that nationalization would occur, I meant specifically that those platforms would be nationalized by the United States Government. They would take ownership of all hardware and software, including any source code that still exists. They and they alone would decide which parties in which countries would participate in future development...IF they want access to the US market.
Does that mean that third parties in other countries could develop their own versions of Z, IMS, CICS, DB2, etc.? Sure. But they would not be permitted into the US market without US government approval...those "foreign" products would not be sold nor used in the US. Also, they would not have access to designs and source code that they do not already have, because the US government would control it. So yeah, they'd have to develop replacement solutions by themselves.
No "cooperative ownership scheme acceptable to all governments and financial and other institutions still dependent on the..." can exist, and for the reasons you outlined. The globalist ideas that dominated 20th century thinking have broken down to a lack of trust, and we now have a bunch of squabbling governments that really don't like each other nor trust each other. Love IBM or hate it, those oldie but goldie platforms sit at the heart of every major financial and government institution today. As long as the US retains influence in this world, the US government will do everything it can to control those platforms.
@en "Z and IMS/CICS/TPF/DB2 and a few others will not be allowed to die. They would be nationalized before it happens."
I think your basic sentiment is that these components are too important to national economies to be left in the hands of IBM. And I agree with that. But, I am not American and I assume that you mean that this collection of technology would be nationalized by the government of the United States. Just for a moment, imagine that you are a bank in Germany or France or Canada or Japan or Australia or ... and your national economy is facing a somewhat hostile economic relationship with that very government at the moment. Having that government explicitly control this technology is probably a bridge too far. The Europeans built their own GPS system as did the Russians and Chinese and (I think) the Japanese. They all did so for good reasons (even though they could freely use the US GPS system) and they all did so when there was relatively little international tension. Non-US governments would immediately start funding their domestic banks and other institutions to find a way off the platform faster than they otherwise would. (And basically all "Z and IMS/CICS/TPF/DB2" customers already have wet dreams about getting off the platform.)
I don't think any single country should or could effectively nationalize this cr-p. There is simply not enough trust between nations (and their economies) at this time. But I do agree that this chunk should be carved off into some sort of co-operative ownership scheme acceptable to all governments and financial and other institutions still dependent on the cr-p. Furthermore, I think that this co-operative should provide funding to accelerate the exodus from the platform. IMS is a good example: built to support the Apollo program and written mostly in assembler, this is neither the database nor the transaction engine that your nation's banks should still be on. China is already leading the way with GB18030. All other national authorities should require that their banks convert all their DB2 tables (and other artifacts) to UTF. What I am suggesting is not without pain. But baby steps will eventually get you liberated from this stifling platform.
I have to go back to the idea of (the government of the United States) nationalizing CICS. That would really be thorn in the side of King Charles and his government considering that CICS is essentially a product of the United Kingdom. Just another reason why nationalization is not the answer but conversion to co-operative ownership is.
If you want to see IBM's eventual fate, there is much that can be learned from the telephone industry. Nothing really happens in terms of Merger+Acquisition activity without the approval of one or more US government agencies: The DOJ (antitrust), the FCC (who plays in the market and what they're allowed to make and do), and a few others.
IBM's overall market position is small these days, but it has a near-monopoly position in many forms of mainframe computing. Whatever happens, you can bet that the US government (still one of IBM's biggest customers) will have a large influence (and perhaps even dictatorial power) in what happens...does the company keep running, how it runs and who gets to run it.
Z and IMS/CICS/TPF/DB2 and a few others will not be allowed to die. They would be nationalized before it happens.
@az The "everything else" mainly consists of stuff that IBM has acquired over the last 10-15 years and not invested in. Also things like watsonx which are really just a UI (that looks like it was created by an intern) sitting on top of other people's stuff. Z and legacy SW has a decent install base at banks, insurance companies, telcos, and government agencies. It's not growing and they haven't acquired a new logo in forever, but it's something they can milk and the government won't let it go under.
@ac I agree with your bullet points, but let me ask you a question: Keeping Z and disposing of everything else leaves IBM with 1960s-era technology that has been incrementally updated through the years. The "everything else" consists of just about every meaningful technology that has been invented over the last 40+ years.
Do you really think Z plus the other stuff you mentioned will be enough to sustain IBM? DB2 can be replaced...one would think that big customers are already planning for replacements to IMS, CICS and TPF.
Can anyone name a single executive currently at IBM who could even remotely be considered brilliant? I know there are some brilliant people working in the trenches at IBM.
I have 77 chevy van to trade for IBM cloud
- Consulting will get spun off, like GTS into Kyndryl.
- Power and Storage will get turned into an IP play, where third parties build it, sell it, and support it 100% and IBM just gets paid a license/royalty fee.
- Most of SW not related to Z/RH will get sold like Lotus got sold to HCL.
- TLS for non-IBM products will be sold.
- Research will be reduced by 90% and AI and Quantum abandoned.
What's left of IBM in 5 years will be Z + IMS/CICS/TPF + DB2 + WAS + whatever they call MQ these days + Red Hat + Hashi + a scaled down TLS to support the above.
34 Billion acquisition managed by AK himself, and IBM is losing the Cloud battle.
AK continues to be the Chief Embarrassment Officer. Going into 5 years, plus all the years prior filled with promotions and so called "Cloud leadership".
Mic Drop Moment (I believe...)
Understood, and thank you for the clarification, sir. AND that is precisely why these so called "CEOs" get the big bucks, right? They are "supposed to know".
Instead, they are mediocre bureaucrats that play politics. In other words, they pay lip service for the people upstairs, while disregarding, not knowing how to manage or help people (the doers) execute downstairs. Innovations is neutralized.
These mediocre bureaucrats feel actually threatened by talent, so they surround themselves with more like their (lack of) quality.
Who the Eff would buy IBM and pay a bloated premium?
That would be worse than Paying 34 billion for Red Hat
Misspoke, worker bees were brilliant but execs were not. Agreed you cannot have brilliant execs who miss the marketplace and have flawed strategies or who fail to execute strategies that might have had a chance due to inability to execute because of culture and bureaucracy
"... some brilliant people that had strategic plans that failed to pivot in time for the way the marketplace was going."
There is not such thing as "brilliant strategic plans " that "failed to pivot in time for the way the marketplace was going".
It's an oxymoron, brilliant plans ether pivot in time for the way the marketplace is going or they create a market segment or niche successfully.
You can't say, "I took 3 years of my life to create the perfect pineapple pizza" and then people either stop wanting pineapple on the pizza, there was no market or the market wasn't big enough. So you wasted your time with some "brilliant idea" that wasn't brilliant after all, because you misread the market.