Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IBM to acquire Confluent

confluent.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 374 posts

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#161

Post by chubot »

chubot wrote: post #135
Romario77 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't describe it as improved necessarily, but successfully integrated. This happened many times - youtube by google for example. Facebook acquisitions are pretty successful too (not looking if it was good for humanity, just from business perspective). Some companies like Amazon buy companies and let them run almost independently - IMDB for example, Zappos, Twitch, Whole Foods, Zoox, Audible.

Android was also an acquistion by Google, run relatively separately, and it grew into something huge

Uh weird that I got downvotes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#His...

Android Inc. was founded in Palo Alto, California, in October 2003 by Andy Rubin and Chris White

Google acquired the company in July of [2005] for at least $50 million

It was ad-supported of course, but it's definitely not similar to IBM acquisitions

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#163

Post by pea »

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.

It’s a shame because people forget how good IBM research was back in the day. I do wonder if they still have great people in those r&d labs, or if they all left.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#164

Post by bdelmas »

oersted wrote: post #108
embedding-shape wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely by now everyone, including non-developers and non-software people, know exactly what IBM is, and you don't sell to IBM/join IBM without knowing exactly what's about to happen. No one joins IBM today and thinks there will be a huge focus on customer satisfaction or focus on great product design, it's all about squeezing maximum profit out of products until you need to discontinue them because you chased away al…

Not wrong but the image that people are painting in the comments is getting close to a caricature now. The stuff IBM is doing on Quantum Computing is serious cutting-edge science and engineering for instance. The R&D they are doing on semiconductors on their 2nm and sub-2nm processes is also impressive and hardcore tech. They are doing a bunch of progress on post-quantum cryptography and homomorphic encryption. They'…

Doing research? Sure... Maybe. But it doesn't mean they are going to get anywhere to mass production... What was their last huge innovation? On top of that I won't give that much credit for what they do or say they do. Remember how much they lied about many of their "innovations" like IBM Watson?

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#165

Post by senderista »

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 had friends that worked at a high-profile IBM acquisition a decade ago and this is exactly what happened.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#166

Post by alienbaby »

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…

They gave up on watson about 18 months before llm's popped up, and they have simply just not got enough cash on hand to compete. While the big boys grew fantastically bigger over the past 15 years as cloud happened ibm fumbled time after time and shrank ever smaller, and is now desperately hoping it can stay relevant. but in the end they just haven't got the resources to compete on that stage anymore.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#167

Post by alienbaby »

pea wrote: post #163
embedding-shape wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s a shame because people forget how good IBM research was back in the day. I do wonder if they still have great people in those r&d labs, or if they all left.

There are good people in IBM. But they don't have the resources behind them anymore. Look at the market cap of ms, Amazon. Google, meta et al, compared to IBM.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#168

Post by echelon »

newsclues wrote: post #141
tssva wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's also weird being in IBM, because if your "contract" ends they put you on the bench. Then you basically have to job hunt within IBM, and if you can't find anything within a month or so you are out. It's super weird." This is standard operating procedure at most consulting/professional services firms.

Also the CIA

Sounds similar to university applied research arms too.

GTRI locally hires a lot of non-students to work in its various labs. Its labs then pitch ideas to private companies and the DoD. Sometimes they're solicited directly if the lab is well-known and has a track record of delivering good research-oriented results. They research and build prototypes around various capabilities: robotics, avionics, even classified stuff.

They're always pitching, because contracts end or fall through, and that's the source of everyone's payroll. The labs can even be competitive with one another, and the individual researchers might spend time split between labs.

Academics as a service.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#169

Post by NewJazz »

fatal94 wrote: post #122
devnull3 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a wide spectrum between small-homelab and google scale. I was surprised how far sqlite goes with some sharding on modern SSDs for those in-between scale services/saas

What you're doing is fine for a homelab, or learning. But barring any very specific reason other than just not liking Kafka, its bad. The second that pattern needs to be fanned out to support even 50+ producers/consumers, the overhead and complexity needed to manage already-solved problems becomes a very bad design choice. Kafka already solves this problem and gives me message durability, near infinite scale out, sha…

Some people don't and won't need 50+ producers/consumers for a long while, if ever. Rewriting the code at that point may be less costly than operating Kafka in the interim. Kafka is also has a higher potential for failure than sqlite.
Post reply on HN