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IBM to acquire Confluent

confluent.io

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Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#51

Post by embedding-shape »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #28

This is so fascinating to me. I mean how IBM keeps taking over other companies, but they consistently deliver low quality/bottom-tier services and products. Why do they keep doing the same thing again and again? How are they generating actual revenue this way? Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house. Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic…

Your fascination seems hinged on the fact that IBM has "lots of talent to make ML/LLMs work" which judging by what they've put out so far and talk publicly about, is very far from the truth. Anyone who has a clue seems to (rightly) have left IBM decades ago, and left are business people who think "Managed to increase margin by 0.1%" is something to celebrate.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#53

Post by cr125rider »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #30

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…

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.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#54

Post by stackskipton »

Boxxed wrote: post #36
gooob wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wait what's wrong with kafka?

I was in the midst of writing a snarky reply and then realized my actual issue with Kafka is that people reach for it way too often and use it in ways that don't really make sense. Kind of like how people use docker for evrything, when what you really should be doing is learn how to package software.

Ops here, Docker is packaging software.

Agree on the Kafka thing though. I've seen so many devs trip over Kafka topics, partitions and offsets when their throughput is low enough that RabbitMQ would do fine.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#55

Post by notepad0x90 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #51
notepad0x90 wrote: post #28

This is so fascinating to me. I mean how IBM keeps taking over other companies, but they consistently deliver low quality/bottom-tier services and products. Why do they keep doing the same thing again and again? How are they generating actual revenue this way? Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house. Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic…

Your fascination seems hinged on the fact that IBM has "lots of talent to make ML/LLMs work" which judging by what they've put out so far and talk publicly about, is very far from the truth. Anyone who has a clue seems to (rightly) have left IBM decades ago, and left are business people who think "Managed to increase margin by 0.1%" is something to celebrate.

To be a bit more candid, they have lots of employees outside of the US (particularly in India). and both in the US and elsewhere, people need to eat. They may not have the talent to innovate new tech like OpenAI and others, or do cutting-edge R&D, but they certainly have the talent to take LLM breakthroughs and adapt. They could have competed with many of the B-Tier LLM services out there with the right leadership.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#56

Post by gnatman »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #30

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…

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?

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#59

Post by photon_lines »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #28

This is so fascinating to me. I mean how IBM keeps taking over other companies, but they consistently deliver low quality/bottom-tier services and products. Why do they keep doing the same thing again and again? How are they generating actual revenue this way? Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house. Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic…

Why in the world would economists need to study this? It's been known that large bureaucracies have been dysfunctional for over a couple of decades now if not centuries. The large reason is because 1) the incentives to do great work are not there (most of the credit for a huge company's success goes to the CEO who gets 100X the salary of a regular worker while delivering usually pretty much nothing) 2) politics usually plays a huge role which gives a huge advantage to your competition (i.e. your competition needs to spend less time on politics and more time on the actual product) and 3) human beings don't functionally work well in groups larger than 100-250 due to the overwhelming complexity of the communication needed in order to make this type of structure work. Incentives though I think are the primary driver - most people at companies like IBM don't have any incentives to actually care about the product they produce and that's the secret behind the ruin of almost every large company.

Edit: you also seem to be giving too much credence to Watson. Watson was actually mostly a marketing tool designed to win in Jeopardy and nothing else. It was constructed specifically to compete in that use-case and was nowhere near to the architecture of a general transformer which is capable of figuring out meta-patterns within language and structurally understanding language. You can read about Watson's design and architecture here if you're curious: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs4740/2011sp/papers/AIMa...

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#60

Post by gedy »

cr125rider wrote: post #53
JSR_FDED wrote: post #30

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…

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.

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.
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