
At least it wasn't Oracle - koolherc
https://chrisshort.net/one-fish-two-fish-blue-fish-sporting-new-red-hat/
======
apohn
I've worked for companies that got acquired and also acquired other companies.

Year 1 is usually nothing and things stay the same unless there is some
serious fat that needed trimming. The interesting years are 2 and 3. That's
when the parent company tries to optimize things (e.g. streamline the sales
force), create synergies, etc and you start seeing the changes. Depending on
where you are in the acquired company, it can be heaven or hell.

I'd like to read blogs about the acquisition at the end of year 2.

~~~
mholmes680
I've been part of 6 separate buy-out/merger/acquisitions (from both angles).
In year 3 of current one.

The event, whether you are acquired or acquiree, presents significant and
unique opportunities to move vertically and/or horizontally to improve your
situation. If you're sitting there wondering about job security then you (a)
didn't have job security in the first place; (b) are wasting everyone's time,
including yours.

~~~
kodablah
I don't think job security is the concern, I think job enjoyment and personal
fulfillment is. For many here that I gather can work just about anywhere they
want, sometimes the movement direction to improve your situation is outwards.
The real time waste in several cases is hanging on.

------
DonHopkins
That's the opposite of what I thought when Oracle bought Sun.

Q: What do you get when you cross IBM and Apple?

A: IBM

On the bright side, now RedHat employees can flash their new IBM business
cards at International Brotherhood of Magicians shows in Las Vegas to get in
for free, thanks to the terms of a trademark infringement lawsuit settlement
from decades ago.

~~~
hinkley
Didn’t Apple and IBM work on an OS boondoggle back in the Windows 95 time
period?

~~~
gargravarr
IBM and Motorola worked with Apple to make the PowerPC chips Apple used in
their (i|Power)(Mac|Book) ranges for years. They called it the AIM Alliance.

~~~
DonHopkins
Then there were Apple and IBM's two joint ventures: Taligent and Kaleida
(where I worked on ScriptX until it shut down).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleida_Labs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleida_Labs)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX)

Working at Kaleida was like having parents who couldn't get along and argued
all the time, so no hard decisions ever actually got made.

ScriptX supported QuickTime on MacOS, Windows and OS/2, but Apple was shy
about IBM and other companies having access to the source code.

IBM desperately wanted everyone to use and love OS/2 (so they renamed it Warp
so the cool kids would dig it), while Taligent was tasked at solving the
problem of Apple's shitty operating system. Taligent also had their own weird
incompatible object model, as well as CommonPoint's "people, places and
things" metaphor, which they shamelessly ripped off from Schoolhouse Rock.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk4N5kkifGQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk4N5kkifGQ)

CHRP was the Common Hardware Reference Platform for the PowerPC, which IBM and
Apple collaborated on. IBM made a CHRP PowerPC Thinkpad that ran OS/2, but out
of pride refused to sell one that ran MacOS, which kind of missed the whole
point of CHRP. IBM just couldn't imagine why anyone would want to run anything
but OS/2 on them.

I would have loved to have a MacOS powerbook running on wonderful Thinkpad
hardware, because Apple's laptop hardware was pretty crappy at the time. It
would have been the best of both worlds, but it was never to be.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC)

And then there was OpenDoc. There were actually two different incompatible
implementations of OpenDoc, one from Apple on MacOS and one from IBM on OS/2,
and they didn't talk to each other (which kind of missed the entire point).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc)

IBM was shipping a bunch of OpenDoc stuff on OS/2 (Eric The Half-an-OS), and
used it themselves, but nobody else wanted to use OpenDoc or even OS/2,
despite their extensive advertising campaign and Warp re-branding attempt.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlrsqGal64w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlrsqGal64w)

IBM's implementation of SOM (System Object Model), which their implementation
of OpenDoc was built on top of, required that you use IBM's C++ compiler to
get special optimizations, otherwise every message send was quite expensive.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_Object_Model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_Object_Model)

Apple had their own implementation of OpenDoc that used their own compiler,
and wasn't compatible with IBM's.

Apple used their version of OpenDoc to create CyberDoc, a component oriented
web browser, which was extremely cool and flexible, but didn't go anywhere
unfortunately, even though it was a brilliant approach.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog)

At the time, CHRP and Open Doc were supposed to be "the future", but in
reality, neither Apple nor IBM really had their shit together nor were serious
about swallowing their pride and getting along well enough to develop products
that actually shared the same technology and plugged together and synergized
as well as they promised.

It would have been wonderful if both Apple and IBM followed through with their
plans to their full potential: A CHRP PowerPC ThinkPad laptop running MacOS,
OpenDoc and CyberDog!

Kaleida missed the boat on CyberDog, but was around OpenDoc early enough to go
through the motions of adopting its Bento file format (FWTW), but never did
anything with OpenDoc itself (neither Apple's or IBM's).

The fact that there were two incompatible versions of OpenDoc on different
operating systems, and ScriptX was meant to run on both, made that kind of
difficult to impossible.

OpenDoc required huge amounts of memory, and so did ScriptX, which had its own
totally different object model (like Dylan + CLOS), so it just wouldn't have
been practical at the time.

As sad as it was, Steve Jobs was right to "put a bullet in OpenDoc's head".

Jobs explained (and performed) his side of the story in this fascinating and
classic WWDC'97 video: "Focusing is about saying no."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8eP99neOVs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8eP99neOVs)

Q: What about OpenDoc?

Jobs: What about OpenDoc??! (nods)

Q: Yeah.

Jobs: Yeah. (sips) (smirks) (leans) What about it?

Q: (laughs) Ooooh nooo!!!

Jobs: It's dead, right?

Q: Huh??!

Jobs: It's dead, right? (nods)

Q: Oh, I don't know, I spent a lot of time working on it. And it kind of makes
me sad.

Jobs: (shakes) Yeah? (stands) Well, let me say something that's sort of
generic. (paces and gestures) I know a lot of you spent a lot of time working
on stuff that we put a bullet in the head of. I apologize. (opens hands) I
feel your pain. (genuflects)

(prays) But Apple suffered for several years from no, from lousy engineering
management, I have to say it. (applause)

There were people who were going off in eighteen different directions, doing
arguable interesting things in each one of them. Good engineers. Lousy
management. (slouches)

And what happened is you look at the farm that has been created with all these
different animals going in different directions (crucifies arms), and it
doesn't add up (bends over). The total is less than the sum of the parts.

(prays) So we had to decide what are the fundamental directions we're going
in, and what makes sense, and what doesn't. And there were a bunch of things
that didn't. And microcosmically they might have made sense, macrocosmically
they made no sense. (waves arms)

(prays) And you know the hardest thing is, when you think about focusing
(fists), right, focusing is saying yes! No. (palms out) Focusing is about
saying no. (palms down) Focusing is about saying no. (emphasizes)

And you've got to say no, no, no. (chops) And when you say no, you piss off
people. (points finger) And they go talk to the San Jose Mercury, and they
write a shitty article about you, you know? (spreads hands) And it's really a
pisser.

Because you want to be nice, you don't want to tell the San Jose Mercury the
person who's telling you this (holds out hand), you know, just was asked to
leave, or this or that, it was that, so you take the lumps.

And Apple's been taking their lumps for the last six months (chops), in a very
unfair way (spreads hands). And it's been taking them, you know (fists), like
an adult. And I'm proud of that (pulls up sleeves). And there's more to come
(spreads arms), I'm sure. There's more to come.

Some of these -- I read these articles about some of these people who have
left. I know some of these people. They haven't done anything in seven years.
And you know, they leave (waves hand), and it's like the company's going to
fall apart the next day (shrugs).

And so I think (hands on hips) there'll be stories like that that come and go
(pulls up pants), but focus is about saying no (Clinton thumb).

And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products, where
the total is much greater than the sum of the parts (chops).

And OpenDoc... I was for putting a bullet in the head of OpenDoc. A: I didn't
think it was great technology. But B: it didn't fit (shrugs). The rest of the
world wasn't going to use OpenDoc.

And I think as a container strategy (hand on chin), there's some stuff in the
Java space that's much better. And even the OpenDoc guys were trying to were
trying to basically rewrite the whole thing in Java anyway (waves hands),
which was a restart (shrugs). So it didn't make sense (hands on hips).

------
ChuckMcM
Having been in Chris' shoes (being acquired by IBM) I found the reactions of
different people in the company most interesting. Several people had the same
sort of "Everything is different now that IBM owns us." reaction, but if you
unpack that, the reality is a bit different.

For a company like Redhat I can't imagine it will be largely changed in the
first couple of years at least, so for that period of time you will be working
with the same co-workers, and if you're not in the Redhat C-suite probably for
the same boss in the same facilities on the same stuff. So in that regard
nothing has changed.

What will be different will be access to a company that has been running for
over 100 years and evolved over that time, at all levels. Facilities all
around the world. Access to some of the scientists that you may have only read
their papers but now can chat with via slack.

If you're currently an executive staff level type (VP, Exec VP, etc) and
you're part of the acquisition, you're going to be landing in a whole
different world of agendas and counter agendas, that can be tough to navigate.
You will want to establish relationships quickly, they will be both rewarding
and help you see things that might be coming your way that you would miss
otherwise.

At its heart though, IBM is just another company trying to do things to make
the world a better place and to profit off helping the world get there. You
will find the Finance guys are ones who have the ability to make things happen
or not, the marketing folks may often be distracted by shiny objects that
don't seem to contribute to the vision, and some of the fading parts of the
business are not going into the long goodnight easily.

And if you're patient and look clearly, you will see that fundamentally the
company bought you so that you're technology could both improve the company
and continue to grow in its own right, and so everyone is "on your side" to a
large extent. The biggest danger to your dreams will be your own executives,
not IBM. They are the ones who have gone from being masters of their own
universe to a star in somebody else's universe, and sometimes that transition
affects them in ways that isn't immediately apparent.

~~~
woodandsteel
>At its heart though, IBM is just another company trying to do things to make
the world a better place and to profit off helping the world get there.

No, no, no. A big company like IBM may have started out that way, but what
almost inevitably happens over the long term is that selfish, greedy,
ambitious, power-hungry, sociopathic people become employees and work their
way up to the top (or get hired from other companies where they have done
likewise) and turn the company to their own ends. And these ends are generally
bad for the employees, the customers, and quite often in the long term the
financial well-being of the company.

Now it is true that sometimes you get a reformer at the top like Nadella at
Microsoft who honestly wants to do things right, and has the brains to figure
out how to do it. That said, it is quite clear that this has not happened at
IBM.

~~~
newnewpdro
> Now it is true that sometimes you get a reformer at the top like Nadella at
> Microsoft who honestly wants to do things right, and has the brains to
> figure out how to do it.

What kool-aid have you been swimming in?

------
tombert
I used to work for Jet.com, which was acquired by Walmart, and I stayed there
for about two years after the acquisition.

It was an OK place to work, and they gave Jet some level of autonomy, but I
left when I read that Walmart wants to start "integrating" their stuff ours,
which in my case was a lot of Java crap that was clearly at least 10 years
old.

I doubt that my experience is atypical with this. Big companies like to buy
smaller ones, but don't like having two versions of one thing, and very often
they'll view their original version of something as superior to the one they
just purchased. In the case of Walmart, I think they bought Jet exclusively
for the name.

I'm hoping that IBM is smart enough to sit back and let Redhat do their thing.
I don't really want Redhat to become something bloated and horrible like
WebSphere.

~~~
kevstev
Interestingly, I had a unique view on the other side of this. I worked at
Walmart Labs at the time of the acquisition as well- remotely, from Jersey
City. Long story short, upper management had changed, they were no longer
supporting remote, at least not for management level, and I saw the writing on
the wall that my future wasn't looking great- I fought against their massive
tightly coupled Pangaea system (that Java code, shockingly was only a few
years old, nowhere close to ten) and lost that battle, I was remote, my saving
grace that I was working on grocery which was absolutely taking off at the
time.

Anyway, I happen to go to a brewery and meet one of your product guys- he had
a Jet shirt on, and I just went over and said hello. We got along great,
famously actually, and after a few beers I said "hey you know, this remote
thing... its not looking like a long term thing... you guys seem pretty
interesting..." and we set up an informal meet and greet. I get along with
everyone, and had a trip out HQ the next week. I poked around about Jet, and
mentioned hey you know I live about ten minutes from their office, and yeah-
all the talk was about how quickly they could get off their stack and onto
Pangaea. I just fought that, and gone through the painful task of moving some
stuff to their stack, and another 2 years of dealing with migrations and not
focusing on customers just seemed terrible. I ended up leaving.

But yeah WMT in general is all about the "one right way" to do things. Which
is great if its the right way, but I often used to say that there were a few
bad teams that were just absolute anchors around the entire firm. I understand
you don't want 10 teams building the same thing, but a little healthy
competition is ok to me...

~~~
emmanueloga_
Where does Clojure fit in the technology stack of Walmart?

Cognitect has a few references that seem a bit old [1], but I see WalmartLabs
release clj libraries from time to time [2], and I heard a podcast once where
someone talked about working with Clojure remotely too [3].

1: [https://www.cognitect.com/walmart-case-
study.html](https://www.cognitect.com/walmart-case-study.html)

2:
[https://github.com/walmartlabs/lacinia](https://github.com/walmartlabs/lacinia)

3:
[http://blog.cognitect.com/cognicast/087](http://blog.cognitect.com/cognicast/087)

~~~
kevstev
I knew these guys, IIRC, clojure originally came from an acquihired startup.
This grew into a relatively small team working on an e-receipts project that
was remote but largely based in Portland.

The most interesting thing about that team was that it appeared that not just
a beard, but an epic beard was required to on it. I keep in touch with one of
them, but he has left the firm. The others... I should probably send a note
to- those were good guys.

I guess more generally though, they are "off strategy" and clojure was not
making inroads at Labs, at least at the time I had left. There was a lot of
gravity towards only using Java on the backend, part of my friction with upper
management was pushing node.js as a backend technology. My feeling on the
Clojure guy was that they were a good team so they were left alone since they
weren't a core feature and they never generated any noise. That's just my take
on it though, why after the big upper management change they really bristled
against certain teams and technologies but were content with others was not
clear to me.

Before I sent this off, I figured I should look at your links- the featured
guy in the podcast was the one person whom I had mentioned that I keep in
touch with but had left the firm- as have the other two that were on it. I
recognize three of the contributors to lacinia.

~~~
emmanueloga_
Got it, that sounds kinda disappointing. Also, Jet was one of the bigger faces
of F# when it comes to big companies using it, so I guess... double
disappointment :-( (I'd love to see both F# and Clojure become more popular on
the job market).

------
makecheck
With Oracle/Sun it was pretty inverted...the first year was a huge cash
infusion, and if anything Sun hardware projects had greater potential than
before.

And yet, within 5-6 years the entire hardware division imploded.

And, meta-comment: this site layout is frustrating on mobile, the text runs
off the left/right edges slightly and it _refuses_ to allow pinch/zoom. Sites
really need to stop writing code to intentionally screw with readers.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
>And yet, within 5-6 years the entire hardware division imploded.

I always wonder what would have happened if Apple had bought them.

~~~
DonHopkins
For decades, I've wondered about this too -- on its face it seems like an
intriguing possibility, but deep down I think it was impossible. Reason:
Extreme cultural mismatch. Not that they're so different, but because of their
overlapping similarities. They would both have wanted to be on top, in the
driver's seat, calling the shots. No way they would have gotten along. No
mutual respect. Too many clashing egos. Especially during the Jobs years.

Oracle's acquisition of Sun was just sad, because they were wiping them out to
make them go away, since Sun couldn't swallow their pride earlier and sell out
to a company they considered themselves superior to, like IBM or Apple. So
their window of opportunity closed, and they got scrapped and devoured by
soulless vultures. An acqui-expire.

------
devstevedev
This article is really strange. the OP has only been at Red Hat for 4 months
[1], and yet he speaks as though he's a Red Hat veteran.

[1] [https://chrisshort.net/resume-cv/](https://chrisshort.net/resume-cv/)

~~~
pinewurst
My model of the OP (or writer of the piece rather) is that he felt he'd
reached safe harbor at Red Hat, especially under his personally difficult
circumstances.

Imagine feeling that, then hearing your employer was being acquired by pretty
much the antithesis of that culture, on a decline and happy to destroy anyone
for a perceived bump in their falling stock price.

It may be different if your perspective is that of a principal from some
failed startup IBM bought. They were nice enough as long as the handcuffs
lasted, you didn't care about the bogus 401k match, and your large-ish check
cleared.

------
imbusy111
Not sure why Chris felt so much anxiety about the acquisition. Red Hat was
already a huge company and things change. After all, it is just a corporate
job and he can find another one, especially in this climate.

I can only understand his anxiety if he is an exec high up the chain and
likely will be trimmed and his multi-million dollar salary is affected, and he
has a huge mortgage, and lots of bills to pay and so on. Otherwise, life just
goes on.

~~~
tyingq
I'm sure there's more than one reason, but he seems to indicate he works from
home.

IBM apparently changed their policy on that in 2017.

~~~
bonzini
[https://www.quora.com/Does-IBM-allow-all-of-its-employees-
to...](https://www.quora.com/Does-IBM-allow-all-of-its-employees-to-work-from-
home)

> _In the USA_ there was an edict last year for staff to work from specific
> offices _based [on] their role_

------
Nrsolis
The one thing I can't understand is why people aren't more excited about the
possibility for IBM to completely transform into an open-source-forward
organization.

IBM does work for EVERY Fortune 100 company. I can't comment on the working
conditions but as a person who regularly works with IBM I can tell you that
they aren't much worse than any other 400K employee sized company. There are a
lot of folks there that love process and a bunch that are IBM lifers.

Still, the potential to push open-source further into enterprise in a HUGE
way, particularly in private cloud, and give a company that might not stomach
a strategic relationship with a smaller organization like RedHat.

Please also don't forget that IBM is contributing to open source projects
(Istio comes to mind) that align with their strategic direction.

~~~
pinewurst
[https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-
discrimination-a...](https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-
discrimination-american-workers/)

Maybe their awful corporate conduct outweighs open source handwaving?

~~~
Nrsolis
Maybe there are two sides to every story?

I'm a person who looks to the future and hopes that e can find a better way
forward. The company has new leaders, new employees, and a new focus on cloud.

There are no losers when a 100-year old Fortune 100 company validates your
strategy and values.

------
phkahler
Theoretically someone could hire a bunch for Red Hat people and continue the
business without too much interruption. The software is open source after all.
Granted, the infrastructure would not come along and they couldn't use the
trademark. But if I'm a customer and my rep tells me "yeah we had a mass
exodus over to XYZ corp and are now supporting largely the same Linux stack
under a different name" I may well take my business over there.

~~~
mnw21cam
Yes, but whoever did the hiring would have to come up with some substantial
capital in order to set up all the required infrastructure, and there would be
a long lead-time before profits started coming in.

------
tome
> after some consideration, I’ve decided to share my thoughts as a narrative
> timeline. Trust me when say that I have given this format considerable
> thought. It is likely the safest way (regulatory-wise) to deliver my
> thoughts on the topic.

Does anyone have any idea what regulations might impinge on Chris's choice of
format for sharing his thoughts?

~~~
gaius
_Does anyone have any idea what regulations might impinge on Chris 's choice
of format for sharing his thoughts?_

None. People who learnt that their companies are being acquired via public
news services are not in possession of any information the SEC would consider
"insider".

~~~
saghm
The author did mention an all-hands with both Red Hat and IBM executives;
there's a pretty good chance some "insider" information was shared there

~~~
gaius
It is very unlikely, because that's just not how this works. Remember all
those execs have been in secret talks with each other for months without any
employees having a single clue. They aren't going to divulge anything which
could threaten the deal, not with billions on the line, not worth the risk
that an employee would let something slip or even deliberately leak.

The company would likely be upset if anyone leaked and take disciplinary
action, but the regulator isn't concerned with that.

------
zeveb
> There were no folks reaching out from IBM saying, “Psst. Hey, man. RUN FOR
> YOUR LIFE! GO GET HELP!”

That doesn't mean that there aren't folks who feel that way. There could, for
example, be people within IBM afraid to speak out, even privately. There could
also be people who have already left IBM who felt that way prior to leaving.

~~~
mindcrime
Most of who's left at IBM are either:

A. "lifers" who are biding their time until retirement and aren't interested
in rocking the boat, or doing anything to make noise. They want to come in, do
their time, go home and go fishing... lather, rinse, repeat.

B. New grads who have no clue what they have walked into because they haven't
worked anywhere else for comparison and haven't been at IBM long enough to
realize how dysfunctional they are.

C. contractors who really don't give a f%!# as long as their paychecks clear.

None would be particularly motivated to reach out to the people of an
acquisition and offer any guidance.

~~~
babarock
380,000 employees at IBM, you're sure your 3 categories encompass everyone?

~~~
mindcrime
No, I left out all the offshore people because I didn't think it was relevant
at the moment.

------
Insanity
Red hat always seemed like a fun company to work for to me. I'm not sure how
my opinion of that will change now IBM is holding the ropes.

~~~
gnulinux
Red Hat was probably my top company that I ever wanted to work in, but this
time around couldn't find good open positions so joined another company (only
a few months ago). I feel blessed because I'd probably feel really bad if I
joined RedHat and then it suddenly became IBM. Now, next time around (in a few
years) I'll know more about this whole IBM acquisition deal, and if RedHat is
still a good company to work in, I can make an informed decision.

~~~
dcosson
Can I ask why? I'm genuinely curious. My understanding is their core business
is selling Enterprise support for linux, which, no offense to them, doesn't
strike me as particularly interesting. I know they also contribute a lot of
open source stuff back, but in terms of working in open source Linux a company
like Canonical seems more appealing from my limited knowledge, just because
their main product is distributed under a free license unlike RHEL. In terms
of working on interesting new software/infrastructure platforms, working
somewhere like Hashicorp, or even working at Google Cloud or AWS also seem
more appealing.

Not trying hate on Redhat, I just never got the impression of them being
particularly innovative. A lot of the most interesting stuff I have heard of
from them seems to have come from acquisitions, like CoreOS or Ansible. In
which case, I don't see why these acquisitions now living under the IBM
umbrella is necessarily that much worse than being under Redhat.

~~~
gnufied
> but in terms of working in open source Linux a company like Canonical seems
> more appealing from my limited knowledge, just because their main product is
> distributed under a free license unlike RHEL.

RHEL isn't distributed under free software licence?

> In terms of working on interesting new software/infrastructure platforms,
> working somewhere like Hashicorp, or even working at Google Cloud or AWS
> also seem more appealing.

I work on Openshift and Kubernetes and for me and barring Google I can't think
of a company where I will get to solve as many interesting problems as I have
solved at Red Hat. AWS is very new to Kubernetes and I do not think they have
lot of people who can mentor someone just starting with Kubernetes. From what
I have seen, if you work for a particular cloudprovider, you pretty much
become goto guy for that cloudprovider in Kubernetes. It can be blessing or
curse but at Red hat - engineers are forced to think one layer above. How will
this work on Ceph FS, NFS, iSCSI and EBS? And yeah - You don't feel like
second class citizen if you are remote at Red Hat. At some companies even
though - they allow remote, they can exclude you, if they want all hands on
the deck (like physically).

It is true to some extent that - Red Hat strength isn't churning out new
technologies (but they can surprise you). But to Kubernetes for example - it
has brought a stability for enterprise(again I could be biased). If you
scratch the surface, many features in Kubernetes that you take for granted was
developed in Openshift.

------
AlexanderNull
Having worked at both an IBM and an Oracle acquisition, once you hit year 2
they'll wish it had been the other way around. A kind of nice thing about
Oracle is they don't really want you to become an "Oracle shop" after
acquisition. They bought you because you were doing something right, and they
want you to keep doing that... just fill out these 10 obscure webforms at each
step of the way.

~~~
onedr0p
Tell that to Sun.

------
chrisseaton
> for $34 Billion (with a B)

What does the capital B mean? Is this long and short billions? I've never seen
capitalisation used as a notation for that.

~~~
dave5104
Usually, that's just a stylistic way for the author to really push the fact
that the dollar amount was in billions and _not_ millions.

------
mixmastamyk
There is some precedence of an acquired company doing a brain transplant on
its host. Think Pixar taking over at Disney, replacing accountants with
creative folks.

Not familiar with IBM's current management enough to know if that is a
possibility.

------
jdlyga
That's a very good point. I wish it were Microsoft, Facebook, or Google. But
IBM is not the worst case scenario.

~~~
pinewurst
I'll argue that it's at least _a_ worst case scenario, at least from the
perspective of most employees. On-thread IBM apologists (thank goodness not
many) notwithstanding.

If I was talking to Red Hat about a job - and I just submitted a resume before
this announcement - I'd break it off.

------
anonyib
He makes reference to the fact that he telecommutes. IBM leverages relocation
where they have offices, as an approach to fire a great many individuals. That
would be my first concern if I were him.

He is completely right about mental safety in the workplace. Indeed, even as a
long time IBMer with a great track record, I don't feel safe by any stretch of
the imagination. This affects my performance and well-being.

I wish him good luck.

------
tzakrajs
Red Hat needed to die anyways. It’s a terrible ecosystem.

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programminglisp
IBM aquisition is not bad in my point of view, it is big corporation which
guarantees stability to the employees.

~~~
eksemplar
I’ve worked with IBM for the past 25 years of my life in public digitisation.
They are the worst partner we’ve ever had, the absolute worst.

They sell things they can’t deliver, they never drive technology forward
unless you pay them to, and then they get angry and confused when you pick
someone who didn’t stand still over them.

Back in the day, almost everything we did ran in IBM mainframes, next year
we’ll be signing away our last contract on any of our 500 different IT systems
with IBM and we’ll never do business with them again if it can be avoided.

And that’s saying a lot, because I think most companies who sell software to
the public sector are terrible leeches, but IBM always took it one bit further
and never understood why no one loved them.

I mean, they still don’t get why nobody wants watson, and keep on trying to
sell it, never realising that what it does for BI is stuff we automated almost
a decade ago, and what it does for deep learning is so much worse than some of
the smaller setups that you can scale by running them on AWS or Azure (
probably other clouds as well, but being public sector we’re in Azure and AWS
).

I think this will be absolutely terrible for redhat, and we’re already making
exit strategies for the two jboss setups we have for when it becomes necessary
in a few years.

~~~
programminglisp
I thought all big corporations provided employees the conditions for safety
and security. I also thought that IBM was technology & inovation driven
company like Google or Amazon, not only IT solution.

