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IBM to acquire Confluent

confluent.io

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Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#201

Post by lisbbb »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #91
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…

> ...and internal systems they have to use, whose sole purpose is to make sure nobody does anything I once had to use Lotus Notes after the company I was at was acquired by the now defunct Computer Sciences Corporation. I decided I would never, ever work for another company that used Lotus Notes.

The worst ever product: IBM FileNet! What an awful product. An acquisition, btw.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#202

Post by jhallenworld »

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…

>mind boggling Byzantine rules

Hint: by all means possible, make sure you are not the owner of (or manager of the person who owns) any assets beyond your personal laptop. If, for example, you end up being the owner of all the development and test servers of the original company, then it will become your responsibility to ensure that each OS (of each LPAR of each VM) is security compliant, is running the end-point asset manager, and has up to date OS patches, that the DASD is encrypted, and you must periodically show physical proof that the asset still exists and indicate where it's located- photos of assets tags or whatever. It will be your responsibility to dispose of the asset (with all associated paperwork) at the end of its life.

It helps if such machines are not actually on the 9. network, or are behind an internal firewall (then they don't care about the security compliance as much).

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#203

Post by bonzini »

lisbbb wrote: post #198
bonzini wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FWIW I have heard that IBM used to force their management style on acquisitions in years past Definitely wasn't like that for Red Hat. We had a CFO with an IBM past which was a really nice guy and never ever felt like he was parachutes from IBM. Now after 6 years legal, HR and finance will move to IBM starting next January; but my perspective from engineering is that after the acquisition it's been and remains busi…

Haven't heard a damn thing about "RedHat" in years, though. It's dead as far as Linux distros go. I'm sure it's used in the IBM-o-sphere, but I'm just not around that at all.

Well I am not sure what other commercial distros you consider to be alive, but Red Hat makes Canonical's yearly revenue in a couple weeks.

Outside IBM land, Meta runs on a CentOS Stream fork.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#204

Post by robszumski »

blcknight wrote: post #128
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They said the same thing about Red Hat. The fact that Whitehurst resigned from IBM should tell you something.

I'm pretty sure Jim had aspirations of being IBM CEO but they picked Arvind instead.

exactly. standard move when you aren't going to get a second shot.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#205

Post by jimbokun »

shadow28 wrote: post #180
photon_lines wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 usual…

> 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 Well, in Confluent's case I'm not so sure that's true given that their CEO is also the company founder as well as one of the original authors of Apache Kafka.

Not Confluent, IBM.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#206

Post by newsoftheday »

tgma wrote: post #143
oersted wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

IBM shouldn't be thought of as a singular company. It is a conglomerate that does widely distinct things. Some enterprise boring profit squeezing, some shady scam "IBM blockchain on Z OS prevents viruses," some research/patent efforts elsewhere. That said the GP is spot on for this sort of acquisition we know what will happen and has nothing to do with 2nm research division.

> IBM shouldn't be thought of as a singular company. It is a conglomerate that does widely distinct things.

Agreed, like others, small startup I was with, we were acquired years ago and first advice from IBMers who'd been acquired was that IBM is like 1000 smaller companies.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#207

Post by numbsafari »

jhallenworld wrote: post #202
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…

>mind boggling Byzantine rules Hint: by all means possible, make sure you are not the owner of (or manager of the person who owns) any assets beyond your personal laptop. If, for example, you end up being the owner of all the development and test servers of the original company, then it will become your responsibility to ensure that each OS (of each LPAR of each VM) is security compliant, is running the end-point ass…

… isn’t this… what you should be doing already?

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#208

Post by newsoftheday »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #91
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…

> ...and internal systems they have to use, whose sole purpose is to make sure nobody does anything I once had to use Lotus Notes after the company I was at was acquired by the now defunct Computer Sciences Corporation. I decided I would never, ever work for another company that used Lotus Notes.

A lot of people seem to voice a disdain for Notes but I actually liked it for some reason.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#209

Post by jhallenworld »

numbsafari wrote: post #207
jhallenworld wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>mind boggling Byzantine rules Hint: by all means possible, make sure you are not the owner of (or manager of the person who owns) any assets beyond your personal laptop. If, for example, you end up being the owner of all the development and test servers of the original company, then it will become your responsibility to ensure that each OS (of each LPAR of each VM) is security compliant, is running the end-point ass…

… isn’t this… what you should be doing already?

Probably, but now it's going to be formalized and will entail a lot of paperwork (manual entry on many very badly written JAVA-based CRUD applications). Sure, these things are all good ideas, but trust me, they have all been overthought. Do you want this to be your job?

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#210

Post by bongodongobob »

askafriend wrote: post #82
theta_d wrote: post #37

I worked for IBM Cloud about 6+ years ago. While there, we had to connect to a Softlayer VPN to get into our Jira instance. My VPN account and Jira account never got provisioned so I couldn't connect nor see the Jira board. My team-mates couldn't even assign a ticket to me b/c of this. They would just put my initial's in the ticket summary and send me a slack of the details. It was right before I left that we got our…

Why didn't you ask to get the accounts provisioned?

I had a similar thing happen to me with a huge company as a contractor. I couldn't work for 3 weeks due to a combination of login issues and permissions settings. Couldn't file a ticket and no one was really sure who to call/ask. Finally a director caught wind of it and knew who to talk to.
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