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IBM to acquire Confluent

confluent.io

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Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#361

Post by ericol »

ethbr1 wrote: post #360
ericol wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Watson was intended to solve fuzzy optimization problems. > Unfortunately, the way it solved fuzzy was 'engineer the problem to fit Watson, then engineer the output to be usable.' I'm going to review my understanding of fuzzy optimization because this last line doesn't fit the bill in it.

The reason LLMs are viable for use cases that Watson wasn't is their natural language and universal parsing strengths. In the Watson era, all the front- and back-ends had to be custom engineered per use case. Read, huge IBM services implementation projects that the company bungled more often than not. Which is where the Palantir comparison is apt (and differs). Palantir understood their product was the product, and i…

> Read, huge IBM services implementation projects that the company bungled more often than not

Well this is _not_ what they wanted to sell in that talk.

But the implementation shown was über vanilla, and once I got home the documentation was close to un existent (Or, at least, not even trying to be what the docs for such a technology should be).

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#363

Post by bdelmas »

_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.

Scanning Tunneling Microscope and high-temperature superconductivity are 40 years old! Magnetic storage was invented in the 60s! Wow that's so recent. We are living in the future! /s

I won't even comment on the rest... You just proved my point.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#364

Post by nineteen999 »

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.

> I'm just not around that at all.

You might live/work in a bubble. It's used everywhere in large enterprise.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#366

Post by maxloh »

JeremyNT wrote: post #98
EarthIsHome wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome has stagnated significantly.

I'm not sure this is bad? It's still maintained, and it isn't like there are frequent revolutions in UI design - if it works, it works. Slow and boring is a pretty nice place to be.

It doesn't really work for me. The first thing I always do with it is installing a taskbar extension.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#367

Post by maxloh »

worthless-trash wrote: post #296
hadrien01 wrote: post #11

Genuine question: how did the IBM acquisitions of Red Hat and HashiCorp turn out? For Red Hat, there's no longer an official "public" distribution of RHEL, but apart from that they seemingly have been left alone and able to continue to develop their own products. But that's only my POV as a user of OSS Red Hat products at home and of RHEL and OpenShift at work.

> no longer an official "public" distribution of RHEL What do you mean by that, like "centos/stream" (aka https://www.centos.org/download/ ) ?

CentOS Stream employs a rolling-release model, which is much less stable than RHEL.

The previous main selling point of CentOS was bug-for-bug compatibility with RHEL. Red Hat is just killing the distro by moving their focus to a non-existent market. Enthusiasts will choose RHEL, while enterprises would choose the more stable RHEL, which Red Hat could earn money from, or alternatives like Alma or Rocky.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#368

Post by maxloh »

m4rtink wrote: post #24
hadrien01 wrote: post #11

Genuine question: how did the IBM acquisitions of Red Hat and HashiCorp turn out? For Red Hat, there's no longer an official "public" distribution of RHEL, but apart from that they seemingly have been left alone and able to continue to develop their own products. But that's only my POV as a user of OSS Red Hat products at home and of RHEL and OpenShift at work.

Well, there is CentOS Stream: https://www.centos.org/centos-stream/ And Fedora is still the upstream of RHEL, nothing changed there.

No, it is a totally different distro.

CentOS Stream employs a rolling-release model, which is much less stable than RHEL.

The previous main selling point of CentOS was bug-for-bug compatibility with RHEL. Red Hat is just killing the distro by moving their focus to a non-existent market. Enthusiasts will choose RHEL, while enterprises would choose the more stable RHEL, which Red Hat could earn money from, or alternatives like Alma or Rocky.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#369

Post by thayne »

HashiCorps wrote: post #236
hadrien01 wrote: post #11

Genuine question: how did the IBM acquisitions of Red Hat and HashiCorp turn out? For Red Hat, there's no longer an official "public" distribution of RHEL, but apart from that they seemingly have been left alone and able to continue to develop their own products. But that's only my POV as a user of OSS Red Hat products at home and of RHEL and OpenShift at work.

Former-Hashi employee here: there's a clear prioritization of enterprise products. So much so that I would not be surprised if they stopped supporting the Open Source projects entirely. That would be a big boost for the forks. Red Hat has far more autonomy. We are not structured the same. On the HR side — many good people are leaving; new hires have to be on-site for 3 days and located in 4 "strategic" locations in t…

That's really bad news for projects that don't (yet?) have significant forks, like consul and vagrant.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#370

Post by AP_ap »

JensRantil wrote: post #246
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…

In Sweden, IBM makes a shit tonne of money from SAP implementation consulting.

So they are good partners ?
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