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IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

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Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#41

Feel sad, I know it's just the way things go in big business, but watching a prime example of a fiscally successful company built on open source who has committed so many resources to kernel development and making the Linux community better get bought by a beached whale like IBM just shakes me.

and the purchase was made on the costs of employees performance. a major reduction of people movements, bonus, enchanges, etc. happened at the exact cost of the declared purchased (internally it was reported 18bi, now it is published 34bi). whole european workforce was impacted.

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#42

Share price was $187.71 prior to the announcement. As posted in the article - $190/share agreed purchase.

And to give even more context, it was $170.00 back in Oct 29 when it was first announced. Thus, if you bought then and sold now, you'd have a 11.7% return in 8 months. The S&P index would've returned 12% in comparison. Not risk-free by any means, but almost certainly less risk than buying the S&P index during that time period. There was a reason Warren Buffett parked a ton of cash into Red Hat stock after it was boug…

There's a lot of market timing in that number. 2018q4 had huge volatility in the stock market. Market dropped 10% during October.

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#43
post #31
post #28

I really hope IBM can keep their fingers out of Red Hat, if not, it does not matter how many promises they make, they will run it into the ground. If they actually manage to keep away, and let their cloud business grow without interference; they actually have a chance to grab a big piece of the cloud business.

You don't spend $34B to not interfere.

Right but if you dont want to see that 34B disappear into nothing you dont want to disregard Red Hats feedback. I hope they just ensure Red Hat gets resources they need and step back.

Pretty sure Microsoft is doing that with GitHub to a reasonable extent. Seems to me now that GitHub has more resources they can do much more than they could prior.

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#44
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't spend $34B to not interfere.

I respectfully disagree - I'm a Red Hatter so you can take that for what it's worth. To me the 34B buys IBM the real estate in the open hybrid cloud market which Red Hat has built up in the last 5 years. That is part of a large and rapidly growing market. If IBM interferes with Red Hat they will likely squander the value of what we've built. If they foster what Red Hat did to win that critical ground then their 34B c…

Respectfully, I think you are being overly optimistic. I worked at a company acquired by HP several years ago. They bought us because we were beating them, and yet, they still thought they knew better, and intefered. You can guess how things ended up.

I am certain IBM will think they know better than Red Hat, and will intefere. It is in their culture. The HPs and IBMs of the world no longer innovate. They acquire innovation and sqaunder it.

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And to give even more context, it was $170.00 back in Oct 29 when it was first announced. Thus, if you bought then and sold now, you'd have a 11.7% return in 8 months. The S&P index would've returned 12% in comparison. Not risk-free by any means, but almost certainly less risk than buying the S&P index during that time period. There was a reason Warren Buffett parked a ton of cash into Red Hat stock after it was boug…

Is it less risky? Say a decent chunk of your portfolio in a single stock? And something weird happens during due diligence , not only is the acquisition over - the stock will bomb. Not sure how often acquisitions fall through after being announced, I assume very low. But still seems similar or higher risk then a stock fund.

Redhat has a 20year history as a public company, it's very unlikely that there'd be a big surprise in due diligence.

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#46

Share price was $187.71 prior to the announcement. As posted in the article - $190/share agreed purchase.

And to give even more context, it was $170.00 back in Oct 29 when it was first announced. Thus, if you bought then and sold now, you'd have a 11.7% return in 8 months. The S&P index would've returned 12% in comparison. Not risk-free by any means, but almost certainly less risk than buying the S&P index during that time period. There was a reason Warren Buffett parked a ton of cash into Red Hat stock after it was boug…

$116.68 right before the announcement! The $172 was the immediate jump.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RHT/chart?p=RHT (See Date Range controls.)

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#47
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't spend $34B to not interfere.

I respectfully disagree - I'm a Red Hatter so you can take that for what it's worth. To me the 34B buys IBM the real estate in the open hybrid cloud market which Red Hat has built up in the last 5 years. That is part of a large and rapidly growing market. If IBM interferes with Red Hat they will likely squander the value of what we've built. If they foster what Red Hat did to win that critical ground then their 34B c…

IBM is large bureaucracy. Large bureaucracy's have a lot of managers.

Managers prioritize their bonuses over long term interests of companies they work for.

It would be strange and/or abnormal (as far as big co. goes), for IBM managers not to try fuck with Read Hat.

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#49

Does this acquisition open up the market for a Linux company to move into the Linux enterprise space? Maybe Ubuntu could pivot into this space.

Probably Ubuntu will be bought by Microsoft. With the cloud, especially containers, there is little future in a business that involves paying for operating systems licenses. Most interesting is probably supporting legacy versions of operating systems for customers who value compatibility to be able to continue to run existing applications with the minimum changes.

I have thought and wondered about this for a while. It would make things interesting if Ubuntu had the resources of Microsoft but would be allowed to be independent in regards to the OS itself. If they wanna push Azure thats ok. You dont necessarily need to use Azure to use Ubuntu if you dont want to.

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#50

Does this acquisition open up the market for a Linux company to move into the Linux enterprise space? Maybe Ubuntu could pivot into this space.

Red Hat's business model and open culture isn't changing. We will remain independent and I look at this as an opportunity for more people to engage with our stellar support and field teams. For some context you can read the email our CEO sent out to the whole company today: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/jim-whitehurst-email-red-hatt...

You're in for a surprise then...
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