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Comment by voidfunc | Hacker News Reader

This is a great move for both companies. The doom and gloom in this thread is depressing.

RedHat gets access to IBMs massive sales machine and IBM picks up a number of key technologies. Win-win.

The problem with any M&A is no different than what happens in marriages - do the two blend together, does one dominate the other's culture, etc? The truth is that IBM's history (and to be fair, almost all 10-figure+ market cap tech companies) even with multi-billion dollar acquisitions (that's almost all they do with the exception of Google and Apple I can think off the top of my head) is that the current company's inertia dominates whoever they acquire and the internal sales-driven culture in developed markets supersedes anything resembling engineering related from a company they acquire. Sometimes IBM gets ripped off too but wishful-thinking top-down thinking instead of a more critical, measured engineering oriented focus is typically not consulted even for absolutely essential company initiatives internally.

Disclaimer: former IBM employee with short tenure with a failed acquisition by every definition of it

"the current company's inertia dominates whoever they acquire and the internal sales-driven culture in developed markets supersedes anything resembling engineering related from a company they acquire"

What engineering-related innovation has RedHat come up with?

As a Linux sysadmin I've noticed that all of the companies I've worked at that have used RedHat chose it not because it was innovative but because:

1 - they could get a support contract

2 - because RH dominated the commercial Linux space

3 - because RH was the OS the admins knew and both wanted to leverage that knowledge and keep their knowledge current for continuing work with this market leader in future jobs (as that was likely the OS they'd use in most jobs to come)

Most of the "innovations" I can attribute to RH have been widely seen in the sysadmin community as negative. Innovations such as systemd, Network Manager, and selinux. The latter two we've often turned off because they caused so many problems. Unfortunately, systemd was too integrated in to the OS to be able to turn off.

There's RPM, but that was created decades ago when RH was not the company it was now, and it's just one packaging format out of many, and not one that IBM even needs to spend billions to buy. The only other positive tech that RH owns that I can think of is Ansible. But they didn't create it. They bought it.

What RH-originated innovations should we impressed by?

The engineering culture is not solely determined by the innovations the company has come up with, so I don't really see the point of the question you ask, with regards to the statement you quoted.

When you say that "most of the innovations [...] have been widely seen in the sysadmin community as negative", well, that can only be true in your own sysadmin community. If you replace "innovation" by "contribution", and make the list include everything RH works on (SELinux, NM and systemd are really a tiny part of it), the sentence becomes factually incorrect, even in your own sysadmin community (I hope).

Also, systemd was not created by RH (LP was not employed by RH at the time), and SELinux is from the NSA's TRUSIX. Labeling SELinux as a "negative innovation" is very weird (not that whole sentence isn't).

When you say that RH's only "positive tech" is Ansible, but that it was an acquisition, that's true for mostly everything RH participates in (Ansible, but also systemd, OpenStack, Ceph, CoreOS, GlusterFS, KVM, LVM/DM, gcc, gdb, systemd etc... were acquisitions or acqui-hires), so I really don't see your point. Does the fact that all of this software originated from somewhere else than RH negates the existence their engineering culture ?

EDIT: made quotes inline

If the bulk of RH's tech was acquired and did not originate with them then why is their engineering culture even relevant? What engineers work by acquisition? That doesn't sound like engineering to me but business.

Now, if you're talking about the engineering cultures of the companies RH acquired, if RH was able to preserve the engineering cultures of the acquisitions they made, why can't IBM?

Also, if by "engineering culture" you're not actually talking about any innovative products that RH itself came up with, but rather the contributions that RH engineers made to open source projects like gcc or the Linux kernel, IBM has done a lot of that too. I'm not sure why that wouldn't continue under IBM's stewardship of RH.

I feel bad for having inserted myself into this discussion. I think I'm actually agreeing with you here, in that there's nothing that shows that IBM couldn't preserve the culture of its acquisition. I just wanted to comment on what I thought was a statement on their engineering culture.

Personally, I just hope that RH can preserve its engineering culture. I can't say anything on whether it will happen or not, because I don't know.

systemd was created when Lennart was a Red Hat employee, for the record.

I stand corrected. There is something wrong in Wikipedia, as he's cited as working for Red Hat since 2011, while systemd was created in 2010.

I suppose that nobody could find another source than him saying that he works for Red Hat in a FOSDEM 2011 interview.

If you have such a source, I suggest correcting Wikipedia, as it may induce others in error.

https://lwn.net/Articles/299211/ is from 2008. This is the first pre-systemd source I could find, but PulseAudio became the default in Fedora about a year before so he might have been employed at that time, too.

Perhaps the surface area business value proposition to paying customers is the incorrect place to look for innovation? RedHat has done a tremendous amount for the Linux kernel over decades, and Ansible was basically a RedHat employee project that was made in response to frustrations and spun out and came back into its fold. Also, prior to the advent of yum (RIP Seth Vidal) rpm was all we had. A lot of "innovation" isn't even hardcore low-level engineering as much as standardization and stewardship - none of these things IBM has been known for since the late 80s perhaps. Selinux was also originally an NSA research project that was adopted quickly by RedHat because most of their customers are security-focused (at least on paper).

Not going to disagree that a lot of what RedHat has championed recently has been controversial. What kind of innovation isn't controversial though until usually many years afterward?

Also, cultures can be relative to each other and are not definable in single dimensions. But nobody besides the most Kool Aid soaked of IBMers could say that IBM is more of an engineering-centric culture than RedHat.

> The only other positive tech that RH owns that I can think of is Ansible. But they didn't create it. They bought it.

Ansible was created within the Fedora Project (owned by RH) as "func" originally. The creators left RH to found AnsibleWorks, which was then acquired by Red Hat in 2015.

SELinux is not purely Red Hat innovation, it largely came from the NSA's Trusted Systems Research Group[0]. That said, you shouldn't be turning off SELinux. Its like saying you should just chmod 777 all your files as you otherwise cannot figure out why your web server won't host your PHP script. On a basic level, it really doesn't take too long to figure out how it works and how to get whatever you're doing play nice with type enforcement.

> that's almost all they do with the exception of Google and Apple I can think off the top of my head

I'm not sure how well Google fares either. I mean YouTube is a success story but Boston Dynamics & Motorola are pretty sad outcomes.

With RH and IBM - they were competitors. So, for everything RH does there is an alternative in IBM (operating systems, application software, Java, etc.). Corporate fiefdoms are not so easily dismantled or pacified :)

IBM has been stumbling around trying to find its feet again for a while now. It seems possible that despite the advantages you cite that IBM won't know how to use them.

Word from the inside is that IBM's own "sales machine" selling Watson for what it really wasn't ... was a great deal of the problem with Watson.

The skepticism about IBM is rooted in their recent history.

Yeah, I have worked for two companies that were sold Watson as a cure all for their problems. I have never seen it actually do much of anything. Definitely nothing that could not be done with any old set of etl tools.

Yeah, whatever happened to Watson? I haven't really heard much in a couple years now..

Word from the inside is that to successfully utilize Watson a lot of careful work has to be done with managing and formatting data... and to some extent experimentation for any given solution. This requires a lot of time from IBM, and a lot of time / resources from the company who buys it.

However, Watson was sold and advertised as more of a drop in solution with a lot promised of results that Watson has never produced.

Accordingly the massive costs incurred by customers were unexpected and the processes to do it right rushed, customer expectations were not met (quite the opposite) and the results were often quite poor.

IBM seems to have backed away from all those grand claims.

Most healthcare professionals I've spoken to consider it an absolute joke, it's apparently a bit of a laughingstock compared to its grand claims of diagnosing all the cancers

It's still around, but now it's generally being sold as what it actually is - an NLP framework for building chatbots and search engines - as opposed to magic sentient AGI that can solve any problem.

Disclosure: I'm an IBM employee working on legacy enterprise architecture absolutely nowhere near Watson. If modern stuff is on the left side of spectrum (AI/ML, CI/CD, Javascript and web frameworks etc), I'm somewhere at the edge of solar system on the right side of the spectrum :)

That being said, my personal impression from the market, and completely unauthoritative, is that Watson is a brand-name, NOT a single product; it's a collection of products, some built, some purchased, some integrated, some stand-alone, some simple, some complex, under the AI/ML/"Cognitive" umbrella. Most companies have branding/pillars - in IBM, Infosphere used to be information management, Lotus was collaboration and communication, Rational for project management / testing / modelling / etc, and so on. So you have "Watson Predictive Analyzer" and "Watson Chat Service API" and "Watson AI Doodad #37", etc where you can seamlessly take out Watson, replace it with IBM or not at all. There is no single Watson product that I'm aware of. Some stuff was likely even re-branded from previous analytics/BI into Watson branding as deemed appropriate.

Globally-intentionally or not (opinions differ wildly), market perceived "Watson" as "that big machine that won Jeopardy" - a single drop-in product, as opposed a suite of independent products that can certainly do many things, but need hard work at data cleansing, formatting, modelling, testing, etc to do useful things.

I mean, cognitive/watson/AI implementation projects seem to be order of magnitude faster than my experience with Enterprise Architecture projects; but still not a "plug in box, push button".

My $0.01CAD :)

Yeah, it'll be great. I can't wait until IBM pushes Red Hat customers to migrate from git to IBM Rational ClearCase.

I think the challenge is that the IBM team have been literally selling products competing directly (but far less well) with what RH has on their truck. IBM+RH need to formulate and socialize a clear and consistent cloud, product & consulting strategy ... and then they can execute. If they get this out there quickly, they are likely to do quite well. If not -- and this seems more likely, given they should have had this material ready before announcing their intent to acquire -- I'm less confident.

People are horrified because IBM is a sinking ship and a monolithic big business that will attempt to look at everything from a fiscal perspective with no real love for what made Redhat great. Is IBM really going to give Systemd, Fedora, the full time kernel maintainers a break and pay them to make “unprofitable” software?

We’re also seeing the end of independence that was making the open source model work with dignity. It was a huge milestone for the company and many people view this as a regression.

What's the antibody response? Can someone else pick up the mantle of wrapping Fedora in an Enterprise offering?

IBM spends so much on R&D. I am not sure if the company is solely focussed on short term profits.

IBM spends a fraction of what other household names spend.

> That’s according to an analysis by Recode, which found the e-commerce giant [Amazon] spent nearly $23 billion on R&D in 2017. Technology companies rounded out the top five, collectively spending $76 billion on R&D last year. The other tech companies that spent the most on R&D were Alphabet (GOOG), Intel Corp. (INTC), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Apple Inc. (AAPL). Alphabet was in second place with R&D spending of $16.6 billion while Intel had spending of $13.1 billion and Microsoft spent $12.3 billion. Apple rounded out the top five with $11.6 billion. Meanwhile, Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) spent $10.4 billion while Ford Motor Co. (F) weighed in with 2017 R&D spending of $8 billion. Potentially telling, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), once the innovator in techland, spent the least at $5.4 billion. (See also: IBM Traders See Stock Plunging 20%.)

[0]: https://www.investopedia.com/news/amazons-23b-rd-budget-sets...

So half of what Apple spent? That’s hardly damning.

Just to note, the Amazon figure does not seem to be comparable to others.

Amazon does not report R&D spend, but “Technology and content” spend. This includes for example AWS infrastructure.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/06/13/how-much-does-amaz...

"R&D" is a bit of a misnomer in the software world. Lots of things are technically R&D that you wouldn't think of as R&D

> This is a great move for both companies. The doom and gloom in this thread is depressing. RedHat gets access to IBMs massive sales machine and IBM picks up a number of key technologies. Win-win.

If you review HP's acquisitions, you can see the "worst case scenario."

IE, what if they just drive the acquisition into a ditch?

When I worked at HP, we saw lots of customers who needed automation software, and it seemed like nobody at HP was even aware that we offered a competitive product. (Opsware aka "hp server automation.")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Hewlet...

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