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Comment by PedroBatista | Hacker News Reader

IBM will not fail, Oracle will fail first than IBM and that's unlikely to happen.

You see, they are NOT tech companies. They have something you would call "tech", they sell something that looks like "tech" but they really solve problems people with access to large amounts of money have.

In other words, they produce cushy and warm beds for C-level execs to have a good night of sleep, and everyone needs some bed to sleep every night..

Technology is a risky and volatile business and IBM has more than 100 years in business.

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Spot on.

IBM really does capitalize on the adage of nobody being fired for buying IBM. Their biggest strength has been in their marketing rather than actual technology.

Note that, being a large org, they do have teams doing excellent work too. IBM research, some of the cloud, design etc. teams seem to be doing good stuff. But most of it is still overpromising and underdelivering while charging clients a lot of cash.

This is less true than it used to be. Oracle/SAP are largely recognized as multi-billion dollar technology quagmires these days; integration has become so much easier that cobbling together a bunch of SaaS solutions to replace a centralized ERP is a viable approach.

Likewise, IBM has become known as a vaporware vendor. They combine the worst parts of management consulting with an offshore / outsourced development process, so I guess it’s not a surprise they ended up like all the other companies that sell business tech solutions (Infosys, Wipro, etc). They’re often mentioned in the same breath these days.

IBM has been banned from our data center for several years. The decision was before my time, but the answer I've been told is overly expensive, unreliable, and poor support when compared to other vendors.

In my experience, IBM’s support is excellent, bordering on fanatical. It’s just that their hardware (in this case, Spectrum Scale and Power9) are preposterously overpriced. Same for their software, if not more so.

I think these two statements can be reconciled:

- IBM's hardware support is excellent to the point of being obsessive

- IBM's support for anything that is not a hardware problem would be better-implemented by a 5 year old eating paste

As a former IBMer I really like the POWER hardware. It is just a shame that it is made by IBM. Like you said IBM stuff is just too damn expensive.

Right, I should have pointed that out: the Power hardware is truly incredible, especially the fast I/O to GPUs. There’s a reason why the national labs and Google have gone with that architectue.

I know about it from the Raptor PC team and their Foss compatible microcode. Would you say it holds its own performance/reliablilty wise with competitors?

Thats why the average company on the s&p500 only survives 10 years so 75% will be whiped out in 10y. At the time ibm was founded the average company stock lifetime was +70 years. So maybe IBM won't die soon but their customers will with this attitude. Every company is a tech company today.

It almost feels like these two corporations (IBM and Oracle) and giant marketing, consulting and legal firms than technology firms.

In the startup world there is a lot of customer obsession. What is it about these big companies that let's them de-prioritize that and still thrive? Honest question.

They have customer semi-obsession, but just a selected big customers ( most SP500 and governments ) and I can't think of a company that offers what IBM does ( the full spectrum, not just a subset).

So after getting in, they don't need to be good, they just need to not be too awful.

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