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 to use, whose sole purpose is to make sure nobody does anything. Finally, the core IBM sales force will start to make demands on them and will short to ground any vestiges of energy, time, opportunity and motivation they might have left. The good team members will leave and join a former business partner, or decide to spend more time with the family. They’ll meet often at the beginning to relive the glory days of pre-acquisition and recount times where they went went above and beyond for that important early customer. But then these meetings will become fewer and fewer. Finally they’ll find a way of massaging their resumes to cast the last years as being “at the heart of AI infrastructure”.
> ...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.
Surely by now everyone, including non-developers and non-software people, know exactly what IBM is, and you don't sell to IBM/join IBM without knowing exactly what's about to happen. No one joins IBM today and thinks there will be a huge focus on customer satisfaction or focus on great product design, it's all about squeezing maximum profit out of products until you need to discontinue them because you chased away all of the customers.
I hope Hashicorp survives. A few higher ups I’ve talked to there made it seem like IBM wants to learn from them, not force their old ways onto Hashicorp. We’ll see. That one is still pretty new.
And even if there is a 20% of executives actually believe in "We should learn from HashiCorp", usually not even that is enough to counter-act the default mode of operation which is squeezing customers. GLHF to remaining HashiCorp believers, but personally I'd try to find alternatives for the software you use from them if you haven't already.
Usually the internal stakeholder that made the case to acquire the business leaves/gets promoted and new managers come in and start the assimilation process.
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.
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 are doing, with in-house tools? They have a mature PowerPC (Power9+? now?)setup, lots of talent to make ML/LLMs work and lots of existing investment in datacenters and getting GPU-intense workloads going.
I don't disagree that this acquisition is good strategy, I'm just fascinated (Schadenfreude?) to witness the demise of confluent now. I think economists should study this, it might help avert larger problems.
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 usually plays a huge role which gives a huge advantage to your competition (i.e. your competition needs to spend less time on politics and more time on the actual product) and 3) human beings don't functionally work well in groups larger than 100-250 due to the overwhelming complexity of the communication needed in order to make this type of structure work. Incentives though I think are the primary driver - most people at companies like IBM don't have any incentives to actually care about the product they produce and that's the secret behind the ruin of almost every large company.
Edit: you also seem to be giving too much credence to Watson. Watson was actually mostly a marketing tool designed to win in Jeopardy and nothing else. It was constructed specifically to compete in that use-case and was nowhere near to the architecture of a general transformer which is capable of figuring out meta-patterns within language and structurally understanding language. You can read about Watson's design and architecture here if you're curious: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs4740/2011sp/papers/AIMa...
> Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house
I do. I remember going to a chat once where they wanted to get people on-board in using it.
It was 90 minutes of hot air.
They "showed" how Watson worked and how to implement things, and I think every single person in the room knew they were full of it. Imagine we were all engineers and there were no questions at the end.
Comparing Watson to LLMs is like comparing a rock to an AIM-9 Sidewinder.
>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.
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.
To add to that i think their R&D labs along with HPE were one of the few to innovate on the memristor and actually build some fascinating concept machines.If i rememeber HPE's was 'The Machine'.
Athough i think they just di/dont know how to adapt these to market that isnt a enterprise behemoth , rather than develop/price it so more devs can take a hold and experiment.
> 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.
There are entire niches of us that make a living (not at IBM) making certain IBM products actually do what they're supposed to. From my vantage point I see essentially zero maintenance going on with their products. I sincerely don't understand the market (why do people keep paying hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for non-existent support?) - but whatever.
I’m pretty convinced there is a bell curve of “understanding what IBM does” where idiots and geniuses both have absolutely no idea.
It really is probably that strangest company in tech which you think could be mysterious and intriguing. But no one cares. It’s like no one wants to look behind the boring suit and see wtf. From my low point on that bell curve I can’t see how they are even solvent.
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 own Jira instance. This was all around the time of the Red Hat acquisition. I remember the announcement b/c we used SuSE for everything IIRC.
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, but again I think this was technically pre-acquisition (I think as they were gearing up to be a more attractive target for an exit).
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)
The argument has been made that the real value of RH lies in the people working there. And if IBM were to interfere too heavy-handedly, those people would just leave, and RH would become basically worthless.
It seems like most users got tired of the unknowns with CentOS and went to Alma/Rocky. Doesn't help that most third party software vendors also didn't bother to support it.
The Gnome desktop that shipped with Solaris over two decades ago is just as useful, possibly more useful, as the tablet-oriented hamburger menu UI of today.
GTK is still alive. It seems like Cosmic desktop with GTK apps will be a reasonable path forward. Of course there's KDE and QT, but I mean as an alternative to those.
We switched to Redpanda's BYOC product because we couldn't use Confluent Cloud (contractual reasons) and BYOC was a third the price of Confluent for Kubernetes while also being a managed service.
I've been pretty happy with RP performance/cost/functionality wise. It isn't Kafka though, it's a proprietary C++ rewrite that aims for 100% compatibility. This hasn't been an issue in the 2+ years since we migrated prod, but YMMV.
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.
IBM is buying market share, not a surprise; at least one telecom has all their Kafka stuff on the Confluent cloud, and there must be 1000s of such customers.
IBM paid a ~30% premium on the current stock price, so all shareholders (I imagine employees own a bunch of shares) will get a decent chunk of cash.
Some redundant departments (HR, finance, accounting and the like) will be downsized after the acquisition.
Engineering and product will mostly be unaffected in the short term, but in a year or two the IBM culture will start to seep in, and that would be a good time for tenured employees to start planning their exits. That's also when lock-up agreements will expire and the existing leadership of Confluent will depart and be replaced by IBM execs.
It depends a lot on which org they go into, and the motivations of the P&L owner of that division.
IBM is a really big and diverse company, in a way fundamentally different from most other big tech. In a sense, it is completely incoherent to refer to them as a singular entity.
My opinions are my own. I worked at IBM like a decade ago in a role where I could see the radically different motivations of divisions.
From experience, and to slightly refute the sibling replied, good for the confluent peeps that get flagged as being essential to the acquisition, they'll get a retention bonus of 100-300% of base pay spread over three years. The cutting of staff will begin likely in the 3-5 year time frame.
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.
Nothing inherently wrong with the core product IMHO. The issue is more with Confluent, who have been constantly swinging from hot buzzword to hot buzzword for the last few years in search of growth. Confluent cloud is very expensive, and you still have to deal with a surprising amount of scaling headaches. I have people I consider friends that work there, so I don't want to go too deep into their various missteps, but the Kafka ecosystem has been largely stagnant outside of getting rid of Zookeeper and simplifying operations/deployment. There have been some decent quality of life fixes, but the platform is very expensive, yet if you are really all-in on Kafka, you would be insane to not get support from Confluent- it can break in surprising ways.
So you are stuck with some really terrible tradeoffs- Go with Confluent Cloud, pay a fortune, and still likely have some issues to deal with. Or you could go with Confluent Platform, still have to pay people to operate it, while Confluent the company focuses most of their attention on Cloud and still charges you a fortune. Or you could just go completely OS and forgo anything Confluent and risk being really up the river when something inevitably breaks, or you have to learn the hard way that librdkafka has poor support for a lot of the shiny features discussed in the release notes.
Redpanda has surpassed them from a quality perspective, but Kafka has them beat on the ecosystem and the sheer inertia of moving from one platform to another.
This is my experience from running platform teams and being head of messaging at multiple companies.
I was in the midst of writing a snarky reply and then realized my actual issue with Kafka is that people reach for it way too often and use it in ways that don't really make sense.
Kind of like how people use docker for evrything, when what you really should be doing is learn how to package software.
Agree on the Kafka thing though. I've seen so many devs trip over Kafka topics, partitions and offsets when their throughput is low enough that RabbitMQ would do fine.
The people distributing software should shut them damn up about how the rest of the system it runs in is configured. (But not you, your job is packaging full systems.)
That said, it seems to me that this is becoming less of a problem.
Some companies like Amazon buy companies and let them run almost independently - IMDB for example, Zappos, Twitch, Whole Foods, Zoox, Audible.
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? They have a mature PowerPC (Power9+? now?)setup, lots of talent to make ML/LLMs work and lots of existing investment in datacenters and getting GPU-intense workloads going.
I don't disagree that this acquisition is good strategy, I'm just fascinated (Schadenfreude?) to witness the demise of confluent now. I think economists should study this, it might help avert larger problems.
Edit: you also seem to be giving too much credence to Watson. Watson was actually mostly a marketing tool designed to win in Jeopardy and nothing else. It was constructed specifically to compete in that use-case and was nowhere near to the architecture of a general transformer which is capable of figuring out meta-patterns within language and structurally understanding language. You can read about Watson's design and architecture here if you're curious: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs4740/2011sp/papers/AIMa...
I do. I remember going to a chat once where they wanted to get people on-board in using it. It was 90 minutes of hot air. They "showed" how Watson worked and how to implement things, and I think every single person in the room knew they were full of it. Imagine we were all engineers and there were no questions at the end.
Comparing Watson to LLMs is like comparing a rock to an AIM-9 Sidewinder.
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.
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.
Athough i think they just di/dont know how to adapt these to market that isnt a enterprise behemoth , rather than develop/price it so more devs can take a hold and experiment.
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.
It really is probably that strangest company in tech which you think could be mysterious and intriguing. But no one cares. It’s like no one wants to look behind the boring suit and see wtf. From my low point on that bell curve I can’t see how they are even solvent.
It was right before I left that we got our own Jira instance. This was all around the time of the Red Hat acquisition. I remember the announcement b/c we used SuSE for everything IIRC.
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.
HashiCorp also changed their licenses to non-open-source licenses, but again I think this was technically pre-acquisition (I think as they were gearing up to be a more attractive target for an exit).
A common conspiracy theory, but not true.
https://www.centos.org/centos-stream/
And Fedora is still the upstream of RHEL, nothing changed there.
Yes, two decades: https://adtmag.com/articles/2003/08/04/solaris-gets-a-gnome-...
GTK is still alive. It seems like Cosmic desktop with GTK apps will be a reasonable path forward. Of course there's KDE and QT, but I mean as an alternative to those.
https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-12-08-ibm-to-acquire-confluent...
I don't understand how this acquisition is relevant for AI.
I've been pretty happy with RP performance/cost/functionality wise. It isn't Kafka though, it's a proprietary C++ rewrite that aims for 100% compatibility. This hasn't been an issue in the 2+ years since we migrated prod, but YMMV.
The second you approach any kind of scale, this falls apart and/or you end up with a more expensive and worse version of Kafka.
I was surprised how far sqlite goes with some sharding on modern SSDs for those in-between scale services/saas
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.
Some redundant departments (HR, finance, accounting and the like) will be downsized after the acquisition.
Engineering and product will mostly be unaffected in the short term, but in a year or two the IBM culture will start to seep in, and that would be a good time for tenured employees to start planning their exits. That's also when lock-up agreements will expire and the existing leadership of Confluent will depart and be replaced by IBM execs.
IBM is a really big and diverse company, in a way fundamentally different from most other big tech. In a sense, it is completely incoherent to refer to them as a singular entity.
My opinions are my own. I worked at IBM like a decade ago in a role where I could see the radically different motivations of divisions.
IBM will likely give Confluent employees a large pay package, and then let them go after the merger.
edit: btw, it's typical for any acquisition/merger
https://www.confluent.io/blog/confluent-acquires-warpstream/
I'll start.
https://github.com/tansu-io/tansu
https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka
Sigh.
Not a drop in replacement, but worth looking at.
So you are stuck with some really terrible tradeoffs- Go with Confluent Cloud, pay a fortune, and still likely have some issues to deal with. Or you could go with Confluent Platform, still have to pay people to operate it, while Confluent the company focuses most of their attention on Cloud and still charges you a fortune. Or you could just go completely OS and forgo anything Confluent and risk being really up the river when something inevitably breaks, or you have to learn the hard way that librdkafka has poor support for a lot of the shiny features discussed in the release notes.
Redpanda has surpassed them from a quality perspective, but Kafka has them beat on the ecosystem and the sheer inertia of moving from one platform to another.
This is my experience from running platform teams and being head of messaging at multiple companies.
Kind of like how people use docker for evrything, when what you really should be doing is learn how to package software.
Agree on the Kafka thing though. I've seen so many devs trip over Kafka topics, partitions and offsets when their throughput is low enough that RabbitMQ would do fine.
The people distributing software should shut them damn up about how the rest of the system it runs in is configured. (But not you, your job is packaging full systems.)
That said, it seems to me that this is becoming less of a problem.