We paid $34 Billion.
They got rich.
We got sc--wed.
No tangible benefit for our people.
Where’s the accountability?
9 replies (most recent on top)
“B/c /red-hat is a world onto its own. The fact that /ibm owns it is totally irrelevant.”
That’s a huge problem, isn’t it? Their lack of revenue impacts us and nothing we can do about it.
“ They treat IBM'ers like losers and ask them to stay away
True that!
B/c /red-hat is a world onto its own. The fact that /ibm owns it is totally irrelevant.
I have to say that, unlike other acquisitions, Red Hat has managed to avoid being blue-washed or assimilated too much. In the guise of being a neutral vendor of modern technologies, they operate more like an independent company who happens to be also rescuing a dinosaur like IBM. They treat IBM'ers like losers and ask them to stay away. And, I guess IBM lets them do it as long as they are satisfied with their performance.
@wdj+1uIuaP9A Oh man, Tivoli. I haven't heard that name in probably 25 years. Worked on a Tivoli project the same year I worked on an Enron project. One died through IBM assimilation, and one died from cooking the books. Foreshadow much?
In all major corporate purchases, accountability is ultimately determined by the Board of Directors and the shareholders. They decide through their actions what is "right".
In my day, the darling of the company was Tivoli. IBM purchased the firm in 1996 for a reported $750 million. After Tivoli was bought, the principals of the company soon left the firm. This included former investors and many early employees, including the major developers of the Tivoli products of the time (Enterprise Console, Sentry a.k.a. Distributed Monitoring, Courier a.k.a Software Distribution). (Many of those early employees were, interestingly enough, IBM employees before they started Tivoli.)
IBM got the IP, the remaining employees and the Tivoli name. The business became IBM's property to manage.
I'm sure a similar thing has happened with Red Hat. Only time will tell if Red Hat survives as a pseudo-independent entity, or if instead IBM will erase its identity and it just becomes another IBM department like Tivoli did.
Redhat is the primary example of IBM changing strategy and buying innovation instead of developing innovation. Thus if you work in IBM legacy, you are in the bullseye. NOTE after two-three years IBM moves the acquired company towards legacy and treats the employees as such. Like it or not, this is the new IBM. Buy it, distributed it worldwide, move it to sustain mode, repeat.
Laying off good developers at RedHat won't make them laying off good developers in the rest of IBM any better. And I say that as someone not in RedHat.
Red Hat layoffs started in 2020 (at least) http://techrights.org/o/2020/08/02/red-hat-layoffs/