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

OS/2 was poised to be a really awesome operating system. Bad decisions and poor marketing really eff’ed that up. We could have had a full GUI, multi-user OS for consumers like 10 good years earlier than we did and it likely would have curbed Microsoft’s monopoly.

I was part of an acquisition, company was performing well against bigger players and IBM came in and threw a load of money at the owners.

Once we completed the transref of business we were paid massive retention bonuses, managers got company cars etc.

Not one sale of the product was made in the next 6 years and the business unit closed down. Previous CEO founded a competitor when his non compete clause ended and the customer base IBM had bought moved.

This is not an isolated occurrence.

Having used PC for a long time, I’d say… The PC 😁

MCA bus for instance

fwiw i work with a bunch of former ibmers.

super super nice people who are crazy smart.

but think something in their brains got wired differently when they worked there - they just build all sorts of amazing stuff without thinking about the strategy for it. who will use it, in what scenarios, how will it be supported once interest surpasses cycles of the creator.

not all indicative of the companies history or current reputation but interesting to see at the micro level

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.

Well, there are exceptions, but I can remember one…

They bought Red Hat, now that company software is going closed source.

Like all the big corporations IBM has bought a lot of small competitors in the past. Red Hat was the only name widely known to the public because IBM targets are software tools for business or the backend of the enterprise infrastructure.

Here there is a list of all their acquisitions.

Meanwhile from the beginning of the years 2000s they decided they wanted to become a consultancy company and rely more on external developers (especially from Indian companies). Internal developers slowly became demoralised in the middle of repeated rounds of redundancies, the quality of their services declined and they lost a lot of clients.

You may see IBM as an innovative company, a little bit for their past reputation and a little bit for the recent advanced projects they announced. But although they have some very advanced research centers the bulk of their work is the one they carry out on the client sites. That part of their work is lagging behind. At the end of the '90s you could find many big companies around the world that handed over to IBM almost all their IT systems. Now it does not happen any more. They are one of the many providers.

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

I still can’t believe they sold ThinkPad to Lenovo. I suppose we can’t have a nice thing from IBM anymore?

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IBM is a law firm wrapped in a tech company.

Source - 10+ years working with them and watching them keep their claws dug in with management.