IBM to acquire Confluent

IBM have an absolutely stellar record of blowing acquisitions. The highly motivated newly acquired team will be in honeymoon phase for 3 months, and then it slowly dawns on them that they’ve joined an unbelievably rigid organization where things like customer satisfaction and great products don’t matter at all. Then they’ll be in shock and disbelief at the mind boggling Byzantine rules and internal systems they have to use, whose sole purpose is to make sure nobody does anything. Finally, the core IBM sales force will start to make demands on them and will short to ground any vestiges of energy, time, opportunity and motivation they might have left. The good team members will leave and join a former business partner, or decide to spend more time with the family. They’ll meet often at the beginning to relive the glory days of pre-acquisition and recount times where they went went above and beyond for that important early customer. But then these meetings will become fewer and fewer. Finally they’ll find a way of massaging their resumes to cast the last years as being “at the heart of AI infrastructure”.

IBM is designed to milk every last bit of money from their clients. So they need to add new products every now and then to add new money flows.

Surely by now everyone, including non-developers and non-software people, know exactly what IBM is, and you don't sell to IBM/join IBM without knowing exactly what's about to happen. No one joins IBM today and thinks there will be a huge focus on customer satisfaction or focus on great product design, it's all about squeezing maximum profit out of products until you need to discontinue them because you chased away all of the customers.

I hope Hashicorp survives. A few higher ups I’ve talked to there made it seem like IBM wants to learn from them, not force their old ways onto Hashicorp. We’ll see. That one is still pretty new.

Pretty bleak, and describes my experience to a T (although involving other companies). Has there ever been an example where a company has been acquired and culture/morale/conditions have actually improved rather than dissolved?

Not to be cynical but that's said a lot in acquisitions by bigger companies to motivate some people to stay, but just doesn't seem to happen.

I wouldn't describe it as improved necessarily, but successfully integrated. This happened many times - youtube by google for example. Facebook acquisitions are pretty successful too (not looking if it was good for humanity, just from business perspective).

Some companies like Amazon buy companies and let them run almost independently - IMDB for example, Zappos, Twitch, Whole Foods, Zoox, Audible.

And even if there is a 20% of executives actually believe in "We should learn from HashiCorp", usually not even that is enough to counter-act the default mode of operation which is squeezing customers. GLHF to remaining HashiCorp believers, but personally I'd try to find alternatives for the software you use from them if you haven't already.

Usually the internal stakeholder that made the case to acquire the business leaves/gets promoted and new managers come in and start the assimilation process.

    > ...and internal systems they have to use, whose sole purpose is to make sure nobody does anything

I once had to use Lotus Notes after the company I was at was acquired by the now defunct Computer Sciences Corporation. I decided I would never, ever work for another company that used Lotus Notes.

In defense of Byzantines. Their rules and amazing diplomatic prowess is what let them be an empire for so long. The negative connotations to Byzantine comes from the negative perception the west had of them. Byzantines were very practical in regards to who they allied with.

HCP wasn't any prize when they got bought, though, right? HashiCorp Cloud was more like a fog in terms of growth. A bunch of products got lost a long the way (Boundary? Waypoint?) HCP lost 50% of its IPO value by the time it was bought. Yes, I know IPO's are high and always go down, but it went from around a $14bn valuation to being bought for something like $6.5bn.

Not wrong but the image that people are painting in the comments is getting close to a caricature now.

The stuff IBM is doing on Quantum Computing is serious cutting-edge science and engineering for instance. The R&D they are doing on semiconductors on their 2nm and sub-2nm processes is also impressive and hardcore tech. They are doing a bunch of progress on post-quantum cryptography and homomorphic encryption. They've fallen behind now, but they were also quite strong on pre-LLM NLP for a couple of decades, it was not all fluff.

Yes they have an awful enterprise culture and they are not focused on building excellent products. But what they offer fits the needs of many organizations, and a lot of the things they are doing on R&D are no joke.

Not to mention HashiCorp bled talent before the acquisition was even announced (BUSL started it) and it didn’t really stop as far as I’m aware.

I've heard IBM is really just an external government agency. If you look at it through the lens of being acquired by a government bureaucracy, then your explanation makes perfect sense. IBM is too entrenched to fail and too poorly run to be acquired.

I'm sure the children who watched their parents get murdered before they themselves were taken into slavery during the fall of Constantinople appreciated those rules and the alliances they supported.

They said the same thing about Red Hat. The fact that Whitehurst resigned from IBM should tell you something.

Hasn't Notes been sluffed off to HCL?

I'm pretty sure Jim had aspirations of being IBM CEO but they picked Arvind instead.

> not focused on building excellent products

> a lot of the things they are doing on R&D are no joke

Sounds a _lot_ like Microsoft too...

Yeah, they acquired the company I worked at and left us alone for a year or two. Each year would get worse though, and each year we swapped nearly all bureaucratic things around. Always a different way to do performance reviews goals, etc.

A lot of the successful projects at the original company are now dead.

It's also weird being in IBM, because if your "contract" ends they put you on the bench. Then you basically have to job hunt within IBM, and if you can't find anything within a month or so you are out. It's super weird.

Sounds a lot like every very large company, in broader terms

Android was also an acquistion by Google, run relatively separately, and it grew into something huge

> They’ll meet often at the beginning to relive the glory days of pre-acquisition and recount times where they went went above and beyond for that important early customer.

Yeesh. Which level of hell is that?

"It's also weird being in IBM, because if your "contract" ends they put you on the bench. Then you basically have to job hunt within IBM, and if you can't find anything within a month or so you are out. It's super weird."

This is standard operating procedure at most consulting/professional services firms.

Also the CIA

That's a very cynical take. Unfortunately likely correct.

It's a fact that a publicly traded company is beholden to Wall Street and any time such a company would use their earnings for R&D the P/E and margins go down (i.e. spending more money to earn the same) and this is considered a negative signal at Wall Street and the company gets punished in the market.

So the only way a company can spend their earnings is to pay dividends or buy assets such as other companies, which then must be squeezed for margins.

More here:

https://www.cringely.com/2015/06/03/autodesks-john-walker-ex...

IBM shouldn't be thought of as a singular company. It is a conglomerate that does widely distinct things. Some enterprise boring profit squeezing, some shady scam "IBM blockchain on Z OS prevents viruses," some research/patent efforts elsewhere.

That said the GP is spot on for this sort of acquisition we know what will happen and has nothing to do with 2nm research division.

My friends at RedHat were embracing similar forms of copium. By now they've all either moved on or are actively hand sitting while exploring options.

There were a series of Dilbert comics that spoke to this.

Dilbert’s company buys an “artsy” startup (represented by a chap with a goatee and a ponytail).

Dilbert comments something like “We get your energy and skill, and we provide … an endless supply of 3-ring binders.”

To which the chap replies “I hear that if your name goes into a binder, you lose your soul.”

Not OP, they have not tried to sell it to us... yet at least. They are still trying to convince us that MyCloud is a amazing product.

I don’t know how many contracts IBM deals with, but the concept of a bench is very common in government contracting. It helps retain talent in an environment that’s more volatile than a typical office. Good for the company to avoid brain drain and hiring overhead, good for the employee because it’s a built-in safety net. Much better than your contract ending and immediately being out of a job, especially in today’s market

Judging from what my contacts say, I would not hold my breath. HCP is going to get smashed by bureaucracy and bigcorp bs just like all other IBM acquisitions. All you have to do to verify this is look at linkedin and track the departures of the the acquired staff.

And in two years, the acquired management team all leaves like clockwork because they got their retention bonus.

Uh weird that I got downvotes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#His...

Android Inc. was founded in Palo Alto, California, in October 2003 by Andy Rubin and Chris White

Google acquired the company in July of [2005] for at least $50 million

It was ad-supported of course, but it's definitely not similar to IBM acquisitions

Doing research? Sure... Maybe. But it doesn't mean they are going to get anywhere to mass production... What was their last huge innovation? On top of that I won't give that much credit for what they do or say they do. Remember how much they lied about many of their "innovations" like IBM Watson?

I had friends that worked at a high-profile IBM acquisition a decade ago and this is exactly what happened.

Sounds similar to university applied research arms too.

GTRI locally hires a lot of non-students to work in its various labs. Its labs then pitch ideas to private companies and the DoD. Sometimes they're solicited directly if the lab is well-known and has a track record of delivering good research-oriented results. They research and build prototypes around various capabilities: robotics, avionics, even classified stuff.

They're always pitching, because contracts end or fall through, and that's the source of everyone's payroll. The labs can even be competitive with one another, and the individual researchers might spend time split between labs.

Academics as a service.

IBM isn’t really a tech company anymore. More of a legal trolling company that cosplays as tech.

They seem to primarily benefit from kickbacks in the form of both leasing and technical contracts for things like opening offices in a location for tax benefits or to promote local economy.

Then they see how far they can cut back their end of the contract after the first few months (e.g. Maybe we agreed to have 500 employees in an office, but since nobody is allowed in, we think we can get away with 100 employees.) Then this turns into trolling about how the contract never defines what in office means so can we offshore… Too much undefined confusion, so I guess we get to break the contract but keep what the mayor paid us… Then they just shut down the office and move on to the next location.

It seems like the local government must be in on these schemes for leasing. Otherwise this wouldn’t be going on for decades as it has been.

The other part of business, technical contracts, is similar except instead of leasing it’s providing some sort of infrastructure coverage for something big. It starts off with good faith fulfilling the contract. Then a few months later it’s like well we have a US military contract that demands US employees but US employees are too expensive. What if we offshore but all the traffic is technically going through a single US employee’s computer which is what the contract technically demands.

Then it turns into well we have offshore people working on this anyway, why not just give them direct access and we’ll have a US person overseeing them. Lay everyone else off.

Then they see how long they can get away with this until someone gets mad. Then they take one step back to see how close to the technical contract they can get while threatening to abandon the whole thing at the same time.

Along with this sort of atmosphere and attitude for the law, it seems we see them constantly doing everything possible to constantly fire old people or anyone else that has legally protected status. So you’ll get statistical analytics on ways to fire protected people based around the constant performance reviews with statistics being used to see how close groups of protected people can be removed without statistically breaking the law. Whatever that algorithm is.

That plays into just straight up cutting people, but it also goes into a lot of other subsystems of skirting the law, like if old people can’t relocate as easily then hopping offices and forcing people to relocate 5000 miles is a way they can be eliminated. Part of this might be moving people onto new teams and then saying that team has to be in office for some made up reason, and then firing them for not relocating or using some made up metric like badging timestamps to get them, or some other technicality like leaving for lunch 5 minutes early despite being a salaried employee which is reported as hourly because of tax trolling.

I don’t know how IBM still exists because from my perspective it’s pretty clear they’re breaking or at best on razor thin gray line on ice on just about every possible law you could break.

They tell that to every company they buy

I never quite figured out why IBM even bought them. Terraform? Wasn’t there an open source clone by that point?

Executives will say anything to boost the next quarter results. After that they get rebooted and start again, and nothing they said before counts for anything.

The Apple acquisition of NeXT has (only half-jokingly) been described as NeXT buying Apple with Apple's money. That's obviously an exceptionally rare case.

I'm with a company that was acquired by IBM ~2.5 years ago. The internal systems are definitely rough, but for the most part it's business as usual.

I've heard chatter from our engineering leadership that IBM is trying to push some silly initiatives, but we've been able to prioritize the right work so far.

I also get more equity (one time award + employee stock purchase plan) than I did previously, and with how IBM stock has been performing lately this has been a net positive for me.

FWIW I have heard that IBM used to force their management style on acquisitions in years past, so perhaps this is a fairly recent shift towards a less hands-on approach.

Scanning Tunneling Microscope, high-temperature superconductivity - 2 Nobel prize right there.

Then laser eye surgery, magnetic storage, relational databases, UPC barcodes, DES, FFT, RISC, ...

yeah, almost nothing. /s

disclaimer: I work for IBM Research and I love every second of it.

Yep, this is a classic acquisition story. You go from a hungry company out there to fight to succeed and join a big corp where most projects are just endless series of meetings people have about what they want to do without any real timeline or immediate plan to start.

The worst is when your sales team (and all of its super valuable institutional knowledge of your specific market) are cut, and all your management is laid off so that the new corp's managers (who have embedded themselves into the corporate bureaucracy like a trichinosis worm) can treat all your teams as free headcount.

Soon, your company, which was acquired for growth, can't do anything and turns into an albatross around the new corp's neck. So the layoffs begin.

> FWIW I have heard that IBM used to force their management style on acquisitions in years past

Definitely wasn't like that for Red Hat. We had a CFO with an IBM past which was a really nice guy and never ever felt like he was parachutes from IBM.

Now after 6 years legal, HR and finance will move to IBM starting next January; but my perspective from engineering is that after the acquisition it's been and remains business as usual.

I have no idea how it was for Hashicorp.

I think I’ve seen people on here describe Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick in similar terms—- or at least in the sense that DC’s culture infected & somewhat replaced Google culture. I may be misremembering though.

I worked for a small company acquired by IBM in 2011. We had a good 5-6 year run where our product sales went up (largely because so many IBM people were selling it) and we were largely left alone. Once things slowed down a bit the IBM rot set in quick though. These days I think all that's left is a skeleton crew maintaining the obligatory long term contracts around the main product, every other part of the original company has been picked clean.

I don't think they're objecting to the idea of a bench as an ultimate fallback; I think they're objecting to the idea that there isn't, during such "internal layoffs", a default automatic reassignment of all headcount to other teams. In such cases, you would only land on the bench if you refuse the automatic reassignment.

No empire lasts forever. Your sentence could apply to a lot of times and places in the pre-modern era

Longer Bench allowed only for consultant with security clearance as those are such a hard thing to come by. General govt work, they just let you go like in commercial sector.

Yes, the bench sounds great but it is incredibly nerve-wracking and I never liked that aspect of consulting at all. Better to just go to zero pay and be a free agent and if the company finds you another gig, great, but no promises either way.

Those are the positives. The downside is that the sales team presents you with really lousy contract opportunities and you are pressured to accept one knowing it is a crap assignment that isn't helping your career growth. And you can be stuck on one of those for years!

Haven't heard a damn thing about "RedHat" in years, though. It's dead as far as Linux distros go. I'm sure it's used in the IBM-o-sphere, but I'm just not around that at all.

You can measure it by how many management steps you, as an employee of the recently acquired company are from the CEO in the hierarchy. As time goes on, this number tends to increase. It used to be easy to see this in Lotus Sametime or something that had some form of employee directory.

This is what is happening with red hat also?

The worst ever product: IBM FileNet! What an awful product. An acquisition, btw.

>mind boggling Byzantine rules

Hint: by all means possible, make sure you are not the owner of (or manager of the person who owns) any assets beyond your personal laptop. If, for example, you end up being the owner of all the development and test servers of the original company, then it will become your responsibility to ensure that each OS (of each LPAR of each VM) is security compliant, is running the end-point asset manager, and has up to date OS patches, that the DASD is encrypted, and you must periodically show physical proof that the asset still exists and indicate where it's located- photos of assets tags or whatever. It will be your responsibility to dispose of the asset (with all associated paperwork) at the end of its life.

It helps if such machines are not actually on the 9. network, or are behind an internal firewall (then they don't care about the security compliance as much).

Well I am not sure what other commercial distros you consider to be alive, but Red Hat makes Canonical's yearly revenue in a couple weeks.

Outside IBM land, Meta runs on a CentOS Stream fork.

exactly. standard move when you aren't going to get a second shot.

> IBM shouldn't be thought of as a singular company. It is a conglomerate that does widely distinct things.

Agreed, like others, small startup I was with, we were acquired years ago and first advice from IBMers who'd been acquired was that IBM is like 1000 smaller companies.

… isn’t this… what you should be doing already?

A lot of people seem to voice a disdain for Notes but I actually liked it for some reason.

Probably, but now it's going to be formalized and will entail a lot of paperwork (manual entry on many very badly written JAVA-based CRUD applications). Sure, these things are all good ideas, but trust me, they have all been overthought. Do you want this to be your job?

> … isn’t this… what you should be doing already?

I still "own" (i.e. I'm the sole user with a root access and can install OS of my choosing) an old machine from the days before everything moved to a cloud and guess no one from IT has got to decommission it yet. I'm have no idea where it is located (besides knowing which office it is assigned to), never saw it, no way in hell am going to attach any tags and waste my time to install enterprise spyware on it or manually encrypt it's data. Do engineers do that for development servers on your job? If yes, name and shame!

terraform and vault are both sticky products

This feels like the kind of post you can only write with sombre experience.

Notes was pretty decent as a groupware/ nosql platform. Lotus script wasn’t great. I might be biased because my first CS job was to write applications with it.

It felt like they basically tacked on the email functionality to to Notes to sell it, but it always seemed kinda ok to me.

For every incredible journey there is an equal and opposite lesson to be learned

That's because your comment is only 3 levels deep.

Let's revisit this when it's Reply to Reply to Reply to Reply :)

Fun fact: there's an IBM/Lotus Sametime theme song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daitUOzVpvc The lyrics rhyme "PC" with "easy."

> The R&D they are doing on semiconductors on their 2nm and sub-2nm processes is also impressive and hardcore tech.

But they don't have production. How can they develop successfully without running silicon in a fab?

That's awesome. Before ~2007 they allowed you to use open-source Pidgin to connect to the Domino servers. A friend of mine and I used it to make a bot: if you sametimed me, you got Zork.

It reminds me of another IBM IT rule: they wanted your chat history (and email) older than two years to be all deleted for legal liability reasons. It was important to save your sametime chat history (an XML file) and export your email periodically if you wanted to keep this stuff.

This was actually better than Slack in one way- you could grep the files for things, and not have to rely on search within the tool.

> IBM shouldn't be thought of as a singular company. It is a conglomerate that does widely distinct things.

This. Employees in the various sub-companies and divisions usually don't even know who most of the executive leadership is outside their little world. There is no cohesive "IBM" anymore, and I don't think there has been for a very long time.

They sell the patents to manufacturers. They are an IP shop.

We (Pidgin) probably could have kept that code working if we had access to a server. But we didn't, and it bitrot, so we've since archived it to https://github.com/pidgin/retro-prpl/tree/main/sametime

I learned more here and I'm not sure I agree with your comment fully.

https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/8shw5r/what_is_t...

I retired a couple of years ago at 54 and now spend my days feeding horses, mucking stalls and spreading the resulting manure (a task consulting prepared me for), but for about 24 of my 30 year career prior to retiring I worked for consulting companies and was lucky enough to never sit on the bench.

People do not have anything to do with IBM Research. As long as IBM Consulting exists, your name will be seen as tarnished and not be taken seriously by most technology workers.

Just look at this comment section as Q.E.D.

Can you elaborate? That sounds interesting

In a lot of ways Notes was ahead of its time. You could easily have encrypted replicated databases with offline work, which was very handy for traveling users back before high bandwidth connections were widely available, and you could build quite complex apps on top of those databases.

I saw at least one large company that migrated from Notes to exchange and they got the email/calendaring bit done quite easily and were still running notes servers for line of business applications years later.

John Kiriakou Described the process in a podcast, maybe the JRE.

The claims about extreme complexity of the Late Roman/Byzantine state came into the popular imagination by Enlightenment and other Western thinkers who were deeply biased against the late Romans due to a long history of cultural conflict. The OP is completely correct here, the reddit comment is an extremely incomplete story. It notes that the Roman state was more complex than other Medieval states (correct), but to say that it was "too" complex is a culturally based judgment, not a fact. The origin of the negative cultural judgment about that complexity waen't coming from the Romans, they were coming from the Franks, Venetians, and later Western Europeans who in large part were repeating the old prejudices going back to the schism, but also justifying their own conquest and abuses of of the Roman people.

Scanning Tunneling Microscope and high-temperature superconductivity are 40 years old! Magnetic storage was invented in the 60s! Wow that's so recent. We are living in the future! /s

I won't even comment on the rest... You just proved my point.

> I'm just not around that at all.

You might live/work in a bubble. It's used everywhere in large enterprise.