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IBM to acquire Confluent

confluent.io

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Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#301

Post by willsmith72 »

phyzome wrote: post #270
Lu2025 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they consistently deliver low quality/bottom-tier services and products I worked with IBMers. The main priority for a lot of them is to ensure continuous employment for themselves and their buddies. They'd add unnecessary complexity to a product to stretch out the development for another couple of years. And they work at leisure pace for tech. Actual 9 to 5, many coffee breaks. They can't compete.

"Actual 9 to 5", meaning the standard 40 hour work week? If someone is telling you to work more than 40 hours a week in a salaried position, and they're not paying out the nose , you're being scammed.

depends, "out the nose" is relative based on what else you could be doing and what else is out there

and no job i've had considered 9-5 40 hours after a 1 hour lunch break

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#302

Post by [deleted] »

photon_lines wrote: post #59
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 usual…

[deleted]

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#303

Post by curiosity42 »

The only way (95%+) companies selling to enterprises survive are if they get bought by a bigger platform and the sales force of the bigger platform just has to sell an extra line item. If you want to make money, track companies that have sales and marketing expenses same order / same / higher than revenue and then create a synthetic index of these companies (they need to have sold something like $1BN in license in aggregate over time - maintenance stream and you confirm that the pig can be sold somehow) . most will be eventually sold at a premium to their traded price.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#304

Post by ChuckMcM »

dpark wrote: post #299
beachy wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I joined IBM over 40 years ago, like my pappy before me. My main takeaway from IBM's longevity is just how astonishingly long big companys' death rattles can be, not how great IBM are at running software businesses.

Are they dying? IBM’s stock is up 160% over the past 5 years.

No. They are a multi-generational institution at this point and they are constantly evolving. If you work there it definitely FEELS like they are dying because the thing you spent the last 10 years of your career on is going away and was once heralded as the "next big thing." That said, IBM fascinated me when I was acquired by them because it is like a living organism. Hard to kill, fully enmeshed in both the business and political fabric of things and so ultimately able to sustain market shifts.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#306

Post by rcbdev »

_zoltan_ wrote: post #186
bdelmas wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Scanning Tunneling Microscope, high-temperature superconductivity - 2 Nobel prize right there. Then laser eye surgery, magnetic storage, relational databases, UPC barcodes, DES, FFT, RISC, ... yeah, almost nothing. /s disclaimer: I work for IBM Research and I love every second of it.

People do not have anything to do with IBM Research. As long as IBM Consulting exists, your name will be seen as tarnished and not be taken seriously by most technology workers.

Just look at this comment section as Q.E.D.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#307

Post by selcuka »

rf15 wrote: post #291
selcuka wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with IBM several decades ago for a customer project, and the solution suggested by an IBM'er for backing up a NoSQL database (Lotus Notes) on a daily basis was to translate and migrate the data to a relational one (DB2), then use a DB2 tape backup system to back it up. When I pointed out that this was a stupid way to do it, they openly told me that they just wanted to sell DB2.

at least they are honest? Also "thanks for the tape backup idea anyway"

Tape backups were the norm back then.

They were only honest because I was working for an IBM Business Partner. They wouldn't disclose it to the customer.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#308

Post by nextaccountic »

moorow wrote: post #266
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…

Watson was a marketing exercise designed to sell a bunch of disconnected text and image processing libraries pulled together by consulting services. It did not function as advertised. At one point we worked with a large energy company that was basically sold something LLM-like (large-scale indexing and searching/querying of documents) in 2016 or so. IBM had a team of 90 people doing full-time data ingestion for somet…

> Watson was a marketing exercise designed to sell a bunch of disconnected text and image processing libraries pulled together by consulting services. It did not function as advertised.

Okay, but why can't IBM enter the LLM business reviving the Watson brand?

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#309

Post by nextaccountic »

mitchellh wrote: post #72
rmccue wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We moved off HashiCorp's Terraform Cloud when they tried to hike the price 100x on us, although that was technically pre-acquisition I think (it was their move to resource-based pricing). In talking with our account manager, they basically said they only really cared about enterprise accounts, and that migrating away would probably make sense for us. HashiCorp also changed their licenses to non-open-source licenses,…

> (I think as they were gearing up to be a more attractive target for an exit). A common conspiracy theory, but not true.

Then why move away from open source?

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#310

Post by nextaccountic »

tristan957 wrote: post #293
tannhaeuser wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only it had stagnated around gnome 2.0.

MATE exists. You can use it right now.

I do. It's great that the UI is stagnated, but unfortunately the UX is too. Things like bluetooth not being integrated with the DE, and various details that we take for granted not working correctly
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