IBM to acquire Confluent

I joined IBM over 40 years ago, like my pappy before me.

My main takeaway from IBM's longevity is just how astonishingly long big companys' death rattles can be, not how great IBM are at running software businesses.

exactly

Are they dying? IBM’s stock is up 160% over the past 5 years.

No. They are a multi-generational institution at this point and they are constantly evolving. If you work there it definitely FEELS like they are dying because the thing you spent the last 10 years of your career on is going away and was once heralded as the "next big thing." That said, IBM fascinated me when I was acquired by them because it is like a living organism. Hard to kill, fully enmeshed in both the business and political fabric of things and so ultimately able to sustain market shifts.

That's an interesting and enlightening way to look at it.

For me it was the death of IBM's preeminence in IT. When I started there a job at IBM was prestigious,a job for life. More than once I was told that we had a lengthy backlog of inventions and technological wonders that could be wheeled out of the plant if competitors ever nipped too closely at IBM's heels.

At that time IBM had never made a single person redundant - anywhere in the world. The company had an incredible sophisticated internal HR platform that did elaborate succession planning and considered training and promotion as major workforce factors - there was little need to think much about recruitment because jobs for life. IBM could win any deal, maybe needing only to discount a little if things were very competitive.

It's impossible to imagine now what a lofty position the company held. It's not unfair to say that, if not dead, the IBM of old is no longer with us.

It is absolutely a different company. I had the opportunity to intern there twice in the late 70's and then was acquired by them in 2015, the IBM of 1978 and the IBM of 2015 were very different businesses. Having "grown up" so to speak in the Bay Area tech company ecosystem where companies usually died when their founding team stopped caring, IBM was a company that had decided, as an institution, to encapsulate what it took to survive in the company's DNA. I had a lot of great discussions (still do!) with our integration executive (that is the person who is responsible for integrating the acquisition with the larger company) about IBM's practice in terms of change.

I interned there one summer and I felt like 9 years ago when I was there the company died 30 years prior. It’s a super weird place to work

To be fair, the whole job market has changed. Layoffs and the death of "a job for life" is not unique to IBM.

I think the pace of progress and innovation has, for better or worse, meant that companies can no longer count on successfully evolving only from the inside through re-training and promotions over the average employee's entire career arc (let's say 30 years).

The reality is that too many people who seek out jobs in huge companies like IBM are not looking to constantly re-invent themselves and learn new things and keep pushing themselves into new areas every 5-10 years (or less), which is table stakes now for tech companies that want to stay relevant.

I don't think they're dying at all, they're just become yet another consultancy/outsourcing shop

Honestly, I think that's people reacting to the market more than it's the market reacting to people.

If your average zoomer had the ability to get a job for life that paid comparably well by a company that would look after them, I don't think loyalty would be an issue.

The problem is today, sticking with a company typically means below market reward, which is particularly acute given the ongoing cost of living crises affecting the west.

turning into a rent-seeking-behavior engine.

the final end-state of the company, like a glorious star turning into a black hole