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Comment by mrkstu | Hacker News Reader

If IBM has one brain cell left, they'll pull a NeXT/Apple merger and let Red Hat executives start running the combined company.

That is the one path to a real future for IBM instead of its slow decline into complete irrelevance.

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Lovely idea that won't be possible. All that brilliance and inspiring leadership from Red Hat will be overwhelmed by the tsunami if indifference that is IBM corporate culture. On the plus side, if you're looking to hire real OSS talent for your team, I suspect a bunch of Red Hat folks will be on the market as soon as their contractual lockups expire.

RH are good at a LOT of things but sales remains a bit of a weak point compared to Oracle and to a lesser degree IBM.

Hopefully the RH guys can bring back a focus on technology to IBM while IBM figure out how to sell it to customers.

PS: so will it be called Blue Hat?

Ugh I hate their sales. There was a day they decided to spam my cell phone number constantly while I was on lunch. Not even sure how they got it, but I finally answered and got super angry with the other end. I didn’t even know it was Red Hat because they didn’t even bother leaving messages. Just back to back to back times 4 calls. Even if it were my work number, if you didn’t get through the first time, spamming my line isn’t going to get you there either.

Given that IBM are after the tech and will probably reject the culture (as also happened when Oracle ate Sun), I suggest an appropriate name would be...

Old Hat (tm)

;)

"I'm still young and I'm not going anywhere," she told CNBC.

#stillyounghat

Oracle sales means promising everything and delivering half of that at best. Are you sure you want to use that as an example?

...promising everything and delivering half of that at best...

I work for a company driven by sales people. It sucks. They keep promising things we don't have and complaining that engineering can't deliver. IMHO a good sales person should be able to sell what we have. Any jackass can make empty promises.

Sales people typically do exactly what they're paid to do - no more, no less. You can shout at them 'til you're blue in the face about overpromising, but, if you've got their pay structure set up such that they can earn more commission by making wild promises, then they're going to keep on making wild promises.

Make them do proper accounting, an empty promise costs more engineering dollars than a believable one, and the difference should not be determined by sales.

The sales process needs both rewards (commission) as well as punishments (commission loss based on unmet delivery). The idea, "As soon as the contract is signed I should get my money." is a broken one as it reinforces the type of behavior that leads to unrealistic promises being made. The 50% at signing and 50% at delivery model is better for this reason. Yes, there would need to be additional language surrounding what an "unmet delivery" would be and how it would be gauged with relation to promises made during the sales process.

In this context, the only thing that matters is whether Oracle's strategy is more successful at generating profits than RedHat's. Is it?

You got half? That's pretty good! ;)

If they can still sell despite having that (very much deserved) reputation, then their sales teams must be pretty impressive.

As Rick James used to say, "Cocaine is a hell of a drug!"

use the IBM sales org, with the RH leadership ;-)

Purple hat

Big Scarlett

Just 'Big Red Hat'

LMAO, I like yours better.

I would like to get this.

No one beats Oracle at sales, they are a sales organization; they just happen to be selling software.

> PS: so will it be called Blue Hat?

Purple hat.

Not likely according to CNBC interview [1]:

> Rometty told CNBC that the deal should not be interpreted as part of any plan for her to transition out of her position as CEO at IBM.

> "I'm still young and I'm not going anywhere," she told CNBC.

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/28/ibm-to-acquire-red-hat-in-de...

I seem to recall Gil Amelio once saying something similar...

That's a positive scenario but I don't see Ginni Rometty relinquishing control voluntarily. The IBM board has given no signs of dissatisfaction with her performance.

IBM is sliding into irrelevance in the mass market for sure, but they've still got a sizeable slice of the HPC/supercomputing market and their research in quantum computing is hard to overlook.

I work in HPC, and, well, it's VERY hard to make a good profit there.

- Customers are stingy (think academic labs, supercomputer centers etc.), are not typically married to your solution architecture so for every purchase they will put out a tender that you have to bid for and win.

- Performance is king, which means very expensive R&D, and customers don't spend much on all these "enterprise value-adds" that enterprise focused businesses use to pad their bottom lines.

Same here. I'm a HPC admin. We carefully avoid vendor lock-in because it gets too expensive too easily.

Performance is king, and we don't buy into the kind of sales bullshit that IBM is famous for.

Sadly, we just standardised on CentOS 7 for our new cluster and I am nervous about its future considering IBM involvement now.

The HPC community have forked cantos before(scientific Linux) and make up a big enough fraction of the centos volunteers to do so again.

A big part of the open source appeal is the the vendor who owns the trademark cannot unilaterally kill a product.

Ginny has drained the life out of IBM -- and not in a good way.

The only effective way for this to work is for RedHat to be an independent company

> If IBM has one brain cell left, they'll pull a NeXT/Apple merger and let Red Hat executives start running the combined company.

Honestly, I could see that happening and working out great .. for legacy IBM customers. But if you aren't an existing IBM mainframe/midrange shop, there will be only tangental benefits for you.

To go with your Jobs analogy, the original iMac was all about preserving legacy Mac users. The new customers had to come in from a different angle. Does either RedHat or IBM have the angle?

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