IBM to acquire Confluent • Hacker News Board

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#61

Post by dangus » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 3:22 PM UTC

rmccue wrote: post #33

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.

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,…

In addition to this, I’ve noticed that OpenTofu is gaining much more interesting features and are actually acting upon long-requested functionality that HashiCorp has refused to implement (example: provider for_each in 1.9.0)

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#62

Post by alexjplant » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 3:23 PM UTC

spyspy wrote: post #49

itsanaccount wrote: post #6

And the enshittification treadmill continues. Great time to be a kafka alternative. I'll start. https://github.com/tansu-io/tansu

`SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER BY timestamp ASC`

Ah yes, and every consumer should just do this in a while (true) loop as producers write to it. Very efficient and simple with no possibility of lock contention or hot spots. Genius, really.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#63

Post by tormeh » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 3:24 PM UTC

itsanaccount wrote: post #6

And the enshittification treadmill continues. Great time to be a kafka alternative. I'll start. https://github.com/tansu-io/tansu

Apache Iggy seems like a project with a lot of momentum: https://github.com/apache/iggy

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#64

Post by stackskipton » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 3:24 PM UTC

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 do they keep doing the same thing again and again? How are they generating actual revenue this way?

IBM has a ton of Enterprise software, backed by a bunch of consultants hiding in boring businesses/governments.

They also do a ton of outsourcing work where they will be big enterprise IT support desk and various other functions. In fact, that side has gotten so big, IBM now has more employees in India in then any other country.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#65

Post by antonvs » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 3:25 PM UTC

elcapitan wrote: post #14

At least you can now safely buy into Kafka, as nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.

I know companies who would certainly have fired people for buying IBM, if they could have gone back in time to do so.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#66

Post by devnull3 » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 3:25 PM UTC

spyspy wrote: post #44

zkmon wrote: post #8

Kafka is already past it's prime time. Time for new solutions for the oldest problem - sending a message.

I'm still convinced the vast majority of kafka implementations could be replaced with `SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER BY timestamp ASC`

That is exactly what I am doing with sqlite.

Have a table level seqno as monotonically increasing number stamped for every mutation. When a subscriber connects it asks for rows > Subscriber's seqno-last-handled.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#67

Post by antonvs » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 3:29 PM UTC

alexjplant wrote: post #62

spyspy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

`SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER BY timestamp ASC`

Ah yes, and every consumer should just do this in a while (true) loop as producers write to it. Very efficient and simple with no possibility of lock contention or hot spots. Genius, really.

It's one of my favorite patterns, because it's the highest-impact, lowest-hanging fruit to fix in many systems that have hit serious scaling bottlenecks.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#68

Post by embedding-shape » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 3:29 PM UTC

notepad0x90 wrote: post #55

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.

To be a bit more candid, they have lots of employees outside of the US (particularly in India). and both in the US and elsewhere, people need to eat. They may not have the talent to innovate new tech like OpenAI and others, or do cutting-edge R&D, but they certainly have the talent to take LLM breakthroughs and adapt. They could have competed with many of the B-Tier LLM services out there with the right leadership.

> but they certainly have the talent to take LLM breakthroughs and adapt

I'll believe that when I see it. They had a decade headstart with all of this, and yeah, could have been at the forefront. But they're not, and because of the organization itself, they're unlikely to have a shot at even getting close to there. Seems they know this themselves too, as they're targeting the lower end of the market now with their Granite models, rather than shooting for the stars and missing, like they've done countless of times before.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#69

Post by Romario77 » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 3:29 PM UTC

gnatman wrote: post #56

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…

Pretty bleak, and describes my experience to a T (although involving other companies). Has there ever been an example where a company has been acquired and culture/morale/conditions have actually improved rather than dissolved?

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.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#70

Post by prodigycorp » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 3:30 PM UTC

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…

> 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 are doing, with in-house tools?

Leadership in IBM also thought that Watson was like what what OAI/Anthropic/Google are doing now. It wasn't. Watson was essentially a ML pipeline over-optimized on Jeopardy, which is why it failed in literally every other domain.

Outside of Jeopardy, Watson was just a brand.