IBM: Rapprochement, Pragmatism, Survival?
May 18, 2020
Just a tiny decision. Probably nothing. The thwarted time sharing warp drive machine is sputtering. Gone are the days of IBM mainframes and those pesky plug compatible pretenders. Online meant IBM, by golly.
Then IBM drifted from the data centers, wandered in the PC wilderness, and ended on the shores of Lake Craziness in the Adirondacks chanting the mantra “Watson, Watson, Watson, come here I want you.”
IBM has a new president able to make decisions different from the previous chiefette. Gone are the daily stock buybacks. Terminations of those over 55 have slowed. Ads, although still a little wacky, no longer explain that IBM is a winner (a game show winner, that is).
The future of the company may be rapprochement. With what company? Microsoft, the devil in the OS/2s? Google? The company IBM understands according to a letter an IBM executive wrote me years ago. Huawei? Oracle, the mere database company which bought Sun Micro? No. No. No.
The “let’s be friends” is explained in “Red Hat and AWS launch OpenShift, a Joint Kubernetes Service.” DarkCyber noted:
According to Red Hat vice president of Hosted Platforms Sathish Balakrishnan, the fully managed service will help IT organizations to more quickly build and deploy applications in AWS on Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes platform, using the same tools and APIs. In addition, developers will be able to build containerized applications that integrate natively with the more than 170+ integrated AWS cloud-native services.
Yes, small news.
However, maybe Big Blue and the cagey orange smile may extend their relationship. IBM’s cloud and IBM itself might benefit from becoming BFFs with the FAABG least likely to kick Big Blue off the revenue bus.
The Bezos bulldozer chugs along, and even IBM can run fast enough to jump on the somewhat indifferent money scraper.
Stephen E Arnold, May 18, 2020
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