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Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

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Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#231

Post by BrandoElFollito »

avereveard wrote: post #152
jodrellblank wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I'm concerned, the term "PC" comes from the "IBM PC"[1] > " The PC was IBM's first attempt to sell a computer through retail channels [...] they partnered with the retail chains ComputerLand and Sears Roebuck " > " Reception was overwhelmingly positive [...] the IBM PC immediately became the talk of the entire computing industry.[38] Dealers were overwhelmed with orders [...] By the time the machine was shi…

> It is worth noting how small the market was at the time though, "In 1983 they sold more than 750,000 machines" - Apple has just passed 100,000,000 iPhone 12s in six months since launch. which is the goddamn point. it was a name in tech circles, and this community forgets how small tech circles were back then heck, someone even cited the cell processor in playstation. outside the nerdiest of gamers, very few actuall…

I am OP and, you are tight, I indeed feel that your answer is full of vitriol.

How, from a funny/nostalgic comment can you derive something like that?

In my world (France, mid-late 80's) IBM was known by everyone because computer = IBM. And computer = important, apparently.

Also the legend of 2001 Space Odyssey's "HAL = IBM shifted by one" was very much live.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#232

Post by yourapostasy »

pabs3 wrote: post #226
yourapostasy wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally most M&A's like this turn into a talent smasher event (think atom smasher, aka particle accelerator), and the people scatter to the four winds in hundreds/thousands of different landing zones instead of coalescing into another convergent organization. Emergent consensus centered around such a large organization takes a lot of effort and time to build because it operates through social trust pathways (that p…

I don't see how RH customers can become a captive revenue stream like mainframe has; there are a few other distributions with enterprise support (like SUSE/Ubuntu) to migrate to as well as community distributions (like Debian) that can be used if you have in-house engineers. Disclosure: I might be biased as a Debian user/contributor.

> I don't see how RH customers can become a captive revenue stream like mainframe has...

In the 10-15 year time frame: IBM can't. Simple as that.

In the 3-10 year time frame however, which not coincidentally happens to be in the range of CEO tenures, the momentum of enterprise infrastructure relying upon a specific platform delivers a kind of lock-in that absolutely can be exploited by IBM leadership.

Look at Oracle. There are still quite a few use cases where their arguably painful pricing, licensing, and account relationship management experience are worth it. For some use cases, there is no other acceptable solution; I've seen them, and Oracle is damn impressive if you operate at that rarefied strata. But for arguably in the Pareto distribution of scenarios where Oracle is used, much of it like CRUD applications, Postgres does just fine.

Yet Oracle today is as dominant as ever in many enterprises.

When it comes to what can and cannot become captive revenue streams in the software market, I've learned to accept that the market can often be irrational for far longer than I can remain solvent.

I really like Debian. It is what I use in my personal servers. I'd like nothing better than to see it supplant Red Hat. But in the enterprise, the Debian story is under-developed. Debian is very rarely supported by application vendors. The LTS duration is half that of Red Hat. The members of the big, profitable enterprise market move that slowly.

I think those are tough problems to solve by someone like Ubuntu basing off a Debian distro to solve on their own. All the other challenges of interfacing with enterprise customers, communicating in their lingo, meeting them half-way, *etc., are addressable by a company organized around doing that using Debian, but there are inevitable questions of resolving differences of opinion in the future between the community and the company. I suspect Red Hat being both the distro and the commercial entity traded solving a lot of those types of problems with a different, more commercially-acceptable set of problems.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#233

Post by pabs3 »

yourapostasy wrote: post #232
pabs3 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how RH customers can become a captive revenue stream like mainframe has; there are a few other distributions with enterprise support (like SUSE/Ubuntu) to migrate to as well as community distributions (like Debian) that can be used if you have in-house engineers. Disclosure: I might be biased as a Debian user/contributor.

> I don't see how RH customers can become a captive revenue stream like mainframe has... In the 10-15 year time frame: IBM can't. Simple as that. In the 3-10 year time frame however, which not coincidentally happens to be in the range of CEO tenures, the momentum of enterprise infrastructure relying upon a specific platform delivers a kind of lock-in that absolutely can be exploited by IBM leadership. Look at Oracle.…

There is a discussion that will be happening soon within Debian that you might like to participate in.

The discussion was announced in a blog post, but hasn't happened yet, some of the related blog posts are worth reading:

https://sunweavers.net/blog/node/129 https://raphaelhertzog.com/2021/03/30/challenging-times-for-... https://raphaelhertzog.com/2021/03/31/challenging-times-for-... https://raphaelhertzog.com/2021/04/01/challenging-times-for-... https://raphaelhertzog.com/2021/04/02/challenging-times-for-...

To participate you'll need to subscribe to the (currently very inactive) debian-enterprise mailing list:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-enterprise/

On your points about Debian & the enterprise;

The private ELTS offering by Freexian makes it slightly longer, but indeed less than RH.

https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended

I don't think Ubuntu LTS is able to compete with RH support periods either.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#234

Post by notacoward »

evol262 wrote: post #50
TheDong wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> leadership style being around a lot of smart engineers [...] building inclusive company culture in tech. Red Hat was certainly an open company. I don't know if "inclusive" is the right word though. "Inclusive" has strong connotations now of people being welcoming, especially of those that are different. This is largely anecdotal, but my interactions with Red Hat and external observations can better be summed up as…

As someone who spent 8 years inside Red Hat, this is exactly why anecdotal "evidence" is garbage. Complaining that an engineering company is full of mostly white males (in an industry which is full of mostly white mails) is an example of nothing. Red Hat started programs to push LGBTQ+ people in 2014, women in leadership in 2017, neurodiversity acceptance in 2018, black leadership in 2018. You may think all of those…

Take that appeal to authority elsewhere, and the insults with it. As someone who was also at Red Hat for eight years (2009-2017) I'd say GP might have been off base but certainly not garbage. I heard more grossly sexist comments (or saw them on IRC) there than anywhere else. We're talking stuff that would lead to immediate mandatory diversity training the first time, or instant dismissal the second, at many companies (including IBM). "Who did she have to blow to get that job" particularly sticks in my mind. Most people didn't even bat an eye because that kind of stuff is totally allowable in the open-source communities these folks were part of. I also saw at least one person fired for refusal to work with people he considered "beneath" him socially. You might say it's good that the company took action, but it took over a year for that to happen and I don't think that would have been the case at a truly inclusive company. I suppose you can dismiss these (and plenty more I could relate) as mere anecdotes, but you haven't even provided those so that would be pretty hypocritical.

The vast majority of people I knew at Red Hat ranged from industry-average to absolutely excellent, but overall I'd say even Facebook had a better internal culture in terms of diversity etc. Painting RH as anything more than a typical tech company in those areas is a bit absurd.

Re: Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President

#235

Post by NAK21 »

jhickok wrote: post #106
throwaway57754 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM bought Red Hat for OpenShift. IBM buying Red Hat was supposed to propel OpenShift and Red Hats portfolio into the C-suite connections IBM had. Instead, it seems IBM has force marched Red Hat to focus all their energies on OpenShift at the expense of their larger portfolio. OpenShift probably isn't performing as well as IBM expected, and even with 4 it still carries the "OpenShift is not Kubernetes" vibe. IBM also…

Containerizing IBM's software and forcing it all on OpenShift is such a weird move to me. When you force your customers to become Kubernetes admins when all they really want is some other solution I think you have a drastically smaller target. I think a lot of Red Hatters are tired of having the IBM sales force show up in their OpenShift accounts asking about upgrading them to Cloud Paks.

Even worse is the IBM team trying to sell IBM cloud saying cloud-only is the way to go. Customer agrees and compares clouds, settles on AWS or Azure, then IBM team brings in Red Hat to pitch hybrid.
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