121–130 of 235 posts
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The "I" in FAANG stands for IBM
One or two of those will be dropped in the next decade or two. It is how things go. In fact, Netflix is only there nowadays to avoid the acronym from becoming offensive.
One of my recent revelations was when I told my teen children "... a company like IBM". To what they said "what is IBM??" They know all the large tech companies but that one was a surprise to them, they had a look at Wikipedia and said "ah yes, it was a great company in your times". Time to get some wine.
Even for me as a millennial, IBM is something of a history note. Yes, I know them from computing history lectures, and I liked their ThinkPads (but they sold that to Lenovo when I was in high school). I have only directly interacted with IBM product once, and that was Lotus Notes in one corporation I worked as a tech support in university years. And it was horrible. At university, I thought of IBM as "they do things…
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Thanks for sharing your story. I wonder if the children of FAANG employees would feel similar to what you felt. I suspect that may not be the case, since most companies don't really make such long term investments anymore.
I think those companies still exist, but they exist in China. I might be wrong though. I just see the growth of China and decline of the US, and I cannot stop feeling like those two are connected. But what do I know. People were afraid about Japan before.
Early redhatter here. I will always have mixed feelings about Jim. On the one hand, I fully respect him, what he does, and how he does it. I think he was a good choice for redhat at the time. However, his start also coincided with then end of the really fun times.
I feel that is normal in the lifecycle of a growing business-- at some point you have to exit startup mode and get corporate, no?
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For what it's worth IBM has transitioned to OpenShift and it is a very successful product line. I think there are a lot of problems with marrying OpenShift with IBM's other products but OpenShift on IBM Cloud is pretty good.
I'm sure it's successful to some degree. They bought it, because it was a successful enterprise implementation. That being said, I'm not sure why I would leverage OpenShift on IBM Cloud when I can get practically the same thing from the other providers with a stronger ecosystem of tooling. Which leads me back to OpenShift on-premise and I'm just not sure that is where the market is at or headed right now.
IBM Cloud gets new OpenShift features quicker than other cloud providers.
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The chip business has so much potential, and they're wasting it all because they're so stuck in their enterprise marketing and sales model. There is so much demand out there for non-X86 workstations with high performance and large core counts, and they won't even touch it. There is so much demand out there for highly scalable and energy efficient cloud professors (to the point that they're developing them independent…
There are many very well funded companies working on merchant non-x86 processors. There’s no reason to think IBM would be any better at it or that customers would prefer to buy from IBM.
I dunno...they've been building processors since the 1950s.
I like Whitehurst and have had the chance to meet him a few times. If you want to understand his ethos check out "The Open Organization". It details his transition from Delta to Red Hat and the transformation of his leadership style being around a lot of smart engineers and team players ready to constructively challenge each other. Good read for anyone interested in building inclusive company culture in tech. Honestl…
In every acquisition the Acquirer imposes on the Acquiree..... In this case, I'd bet that it's Arvind Krishna pulling people out of IBM Cloud (his old division) to run the rest of "big blue" And yes, IBM will basically bleed talent from Red Hat for the next 3 years until RHEL is a pale shadow of its former self.
Early redhatter here. I will always have mixed feelings about Jim. On the one hand, I fully respect him, what he does, and how he does it. I think he was a good choice for redhat at the time. However, his start also coincided with then end of the really fun times.
Could you expand on that? Did he centralize planning or tighten budgets or something?
I won't say things totally changed but, as is necessary as you grow, more process was put in place, there was a more deliberate use of data, a shift from "random acts" that made sense in isolation to more programmatic ways of doing things.
These things weren't bad and were in fact needed. But, even if Red Hat wasn't really still a startup when Whitehurst took over, it wasn't really a mature large company either.
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One or two of those will be dropped in the next decade or two. It is how things go. In fact, Netflix is only there nowadays to avoid the acronym from becoming offensive.
And it doesn't include Microsoft for some reason. FANMAG always made more sense to me.
I'd really like to see IBMers talk about the past, present, and future of the company. It looks pretty pale to me. Back in the Thinkpad era, IBM had a lot of cool stuff going on. But now it seems like a shadow. Watson and IBM cloud look like flops. The email fiasco is weird and should never have happened. What did buying Red Hat accomplish? As an outsider, it doesn't seem to have infused any new ideas, and the change…
> The chip business looks promising. Maybe IBM should double down there? I always thought IBM should have bought ARM, the combination of IBM chip tech plus ARMs designs and Red Hat for the software stack would make for an amazing tech business.