# Corporate Influence



## Phishfry (Aug 13, 2019)

I think you can start to see the footprint Microsoft has left on Github.

When do you think we will see IBM's footprint on Redhat show up? They paid 34 Billion dollars for them.
Sound like alot for the original 'Open Source Company'.
I expect the Raleigh-Durham Area (RedHat HQ) to see thousands of layoff coming up. Because big blue seems good at that.
Lots of experienced folks will be slashed.

What do you think IBM's plans are with RedHat? Huge part of their numbers are government so that is in line with IBM client base.
To me it seems like a weird synergy.


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## Phishfry (Aug 13, 2019)

One striking thing, both of these companies have East Coast headquarters. A rarity in the 'Silicon Valley' tech world.


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## Phishfry (Aug 13, 2019)

Imagine the culture clash.
Birkenstocks and ping pong tables for Raleigh while Albany is Tie and Jacket meanwhile losing 100K people to India.
The big bang is coming. Alan Cox will be leaving within 2 years.


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## CraigHB (Aug 13, 2019)

It's kind of a sad state of affairs for me.  I really like using software not embroiled in corporate culture.  Sad to hear about GitHub.  RedHat going to IBM is sad too, but they were already well on their way to corportatedom before IBM took over.


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## Phishfry (Aug 13, 2019)

Microsoft seems to be keeping Github the way it is.. Hopefully that does not change.


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## Sevendogsbsd (Aug 13, 2019)

Not sure what to make of the IBM deal. IBM got their a$$ spanked after the Compaq and PC clone explosion and their "take over the world" plot was foiled, even though Compaq had to pay them. I don't know anything about IBM in terms of corporate strategy. I do not trust Microsoft at all though - they have never failed to be dirty in their efforts towards world domination, but that was mostly during their Ballmer era. 

Github is so widely used, I hope they leave it alone.


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## kpedersen (Aug 13, 2019)

Phishfry said:


> Microsoft seems to be keeping Github the way it is.. Hopefully that does not change.


I have noticed a few "security" related changes; such as confirmation of email and other soft-core slurpy things.


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## ralphbsz (Aug 13, 2019)

Phishfry said:


> When do you think we will see IBM's footprint on Redhat show up?


A little bit a week ago, and a month ago, and a quarter ago. That's when the people who don't want to work for IBM quit. This is common when IBM buys a company (which they do all the time, although not always at that scale): Some employees who really hate IBM (often former IBMers) will quit immediately.

The next step will be in 3-6 months, when IBM management has been put in place, and IBM's philosophy (follow policy and procedure mindlessly, never attempt to think) is being followed. That's when innovation will stop, a lot more employees will quit, and a lot of the remaining ones will become cynical and go into the "inner emigration".

And finally, in about 2-3 years, the stock options that must have been granted to retain high-level employees will vest; that's when there will be an exodus of high-level employees (duh).



> I expect the Raleigh-Durham Area (RedHat HQ) to see thousands of layoff coming up. Because big blue seems good at that.


True. But Raleigh-Durham is also where IBM and Lenovo have huge facilities.



Phishfry said:


> One striking thing, both of these companies have East Coast headquarters. A rarity in the 'Silicon Valley' tech world.


Not really. Lots of other companies are also outside Silly Valley: SAP, Microsoft. Plus the largest software companies in the world are not in Silicon Valley, and aren't even computer companies. About 25 years ago, they were GE, Boing, and GM. Today we probably need to add Airbus and Ford and ...



Phishfry said:


> Imagine the culture clash.
> ...  while Albany is Tie and Jacket ...


I worked at IBM for 16 years. There was exactly one colleague in our office of about 800 people who regularly wore suit and tie. He was a bit elderly, retired at age 75 or so (he started at IBM in ~1965). In those 16 years, I wore suit and tie exactly once.

The culture clash is massive, but it is not what people wear, nor what they eat and how they amuse themselves. It is about corporate culture: how are decisions made, what values drive decisions, how do people interact with each other.


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## Sevendogsbsd (Aug 13, 2019)

I don't think security related things are bad, unless they make you get a Microsoft email account to validate


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## moridin (Aug 13, 2019)

Sevendogsbsd said:


> I don't think security related things are bad, unless they make you get a Microsoft email account to validate



Did they ever for any of their services? They allow just any email to create Microsoft account, and do seem a lesser evil now compared to Google (IMO).  Bashing Microsoft just because it's Microsoft became a bit pointless nowadays.


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## Crivens (Aug 13, 2019)

Has there ever been a case where the company value _after_ a merger was more than the sum of the components?


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## Sevendogsbsd (Aug 13, 2019)

They don't, not bashing them, just relaying my mistrust. Google isn't evil, just a information gathering company. I am sure there are far worse companies out there.


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## moridin (Aug 13, 2019)

Sevendogsbsd said:


> unless they make you get a Microsoft email account to validate



That's what I was replying exactly.  I just got myself a new android phone, and as you really need a google account to use it, I tried creating one using my *existing* email address.  No matter what, all my attempts stalled at the "verification phone number", where none of ones I have worked, without any explanation (and there's a lot of noise about that in the web). Yes, I could create an account directly from the phone, but that comes only with new gmail account, which I don't want. So I'm back to using my iPhone with Apple account linked to my existing email (without any problem), and don't think I'll try android one any time soon. Same with Microsoft, I simply used my existing email to get a Microsoft account.

Sorry for getting more off-topic'y than off-topics here


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## Crivens (Aug 13, 2019)

ralphbsz That one time being the first day?

After a certain size is reached companies resemble religions - only the ordonat changes and the hyms and prayers.


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## Sevendogsbsd (Aug 13, 2019)

moridin said:


> That's what I was replying exactly.  I just got myself a new android phone, and as you really need a google account to use it, I tried creating one using my *existing* email address.  No matter what, all my attempts stalled at the "verification phone number", where none of ones I have worked, without any explanation (and there's a lot of noise about that in the web). Yes, I could create an account directly from the phone, but that comes only with new gmail account, which I don't want. So I'm back to using my iPhone with Apple account linked to my existing email (without any problem), and don't think I'll try android one any time soon. Same with Microsoft, I simply used my existing email to get a Microsoft account.
> 
> Sorry for getting more off-topic'y than off-topics here



I understand completely. I absolutely love Android phones, Samsung specifically, but you cannot de-googlefy them at all, as you mentioned. I would love to have an Apple phone for the very reasons you state but their hardware (even their flagships) cannot hold a candle to my Samsung Note 8, plus iOS is utterly baffling to me, although I would figure it out. 

Off topic as well so will cut it short!


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## Phishfry (Aug 13, 2019)

Sevendogsbsd said:


> IBM got their a$$ spanked after the Compaq and PC clone explosion and their "take over the world" plot was foiled, even though Compaq had to pay them.


I don't think the PC business failures made or broke them. That was a side deal they gambled on. They are a mainframe company.
Every-time you are in a big box store using a POS, good chance IBM equipment is in use.
Same with many other industries like health care.


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## Sevendogsbsd (Aug 13, 2019)

Right - I guess I meant they failed at dominating the PC market but I guess maybe not a total failure because they really sparked an explosion of the desktop PC.


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## Phishfry (Aug 13, 2019)

I bet handheld calculators cost them more money (in lost revenue).









						Tabulating machine - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org


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## Crivens (Aug 13, 2019)

I think this is firmly out of our circle of influence - or is there anyone here who has any big say in that matter? So we can only watch and learn. I for one learned that the moment McKinsey drones breach the perimeter, my updated CV goes out. Now let's observe what happens here...


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## ralphbsz (Aug 14, 2019)

Sevendogsbsd said:


> Google isn't evil, just a information gathering company.


(Same applies to Facebook, Twitter, ...) No, incorrect. The big internet companies don't make money by gathering and selling information. They mostly make money by selling ads. Some of them also make money by selling other services (for example, Google sells enterprise e-mail and productivity software, and cloud services).

In the particular case of Facebook, it is actually true that they have been known to sell collected data for money (I don't think the other internet companies do that at all, but I'm not an expert). But even with Facebook, the vast majority of their revenue comes from selling ad space on the web pages they serve, or organizing ads for other web sites.

This is a basic fallacy of privacy: everyone thinks that their personal data is SOOO valuable. That statement is mostly wrong. It only becomes valuable if it becomes actionable. For example, you can go to the black market, and buy a few million good credit card numbers with matching names, for pennies per credit card. That's because credit card fraud protection has become good enough that knowing someone's credit card number is no longer very interesting. Less actionable information is even less valuable. For example, knowing that a specific person (let's call him Adam) likes to watch cat videos and russian car crash videos is fascinating, but has no economic value at all. The way a company like Facebook survives is: it collects data to make an intelligent guess at what ads you are likely to pay attention to and click on, and then it gets money from advertisers who want to take advantage of that guess.


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## ralphbsz (Aug 14, 2019)

Crivens said:


> ralphbsz That one time being the first day?


No, I did that in my standard outfit: Jeans, sandals, sweatshirt. It was much later, when I was being trotted out to meet important customers, from a culture where businesspeople HAVE TO formal attire.


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## tedbell (Aug 14, 2019)

Sevendogsbsd said:


> I understand completely. I absolutely love Android phones, Samsung specifically,* but you cannot de-googlefy them at all,* as you mentioned. I would love to have an Apple phone for the very reasons you state but their hardware (even their flagships) cannot hold a candle to my Samsung Note 8, plus iOS is utterly baffling to me, although I would figure it out.
> 
> Off topic as well so will cut it short!



You can with a custom ROM and by using Aptoide for example. It won't be as user-friendly but it will still work.


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## ralphbsz (Aug 14, 2019)

(About IBM)


Phishfry said:


> I don't think the PC business failures made or broke them. That was a side deal they gambled on.


Exactly. And they were smart enough to get out of it, when they understood that making money in that business would be difficult, and not compatible with their values and corporate culture. Same as with getting out of the disk drive business, or the printer business, or the "specialized software for NASA" business.



> They are a mainframe company.


Wrong. While they do sell mainframes, it is actually a small part of the overall revenue, and a medium size of the overall profit.

IBM's business model is to be a computer services company. You are a medium or large enterprise (or government agency), you come to IBM, and they will get you up and running with all your IT needs. They may sell you computers, they may sell you computers that others have made (IBM used to be the biggest reseller of Digital Equipment hardware!), and most importantly they will understand your business needs, tailor their solution to what you really need (not what you say you want). And the biggest part of their offering will be the services that go with it. I've joked before that IBM is mostly a temp agency for sys admins. That's a cruel way to describe it, but has a large grain of truth: business services is the largest part of their business. Not hardware or software.


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## Beastie7 (Aug 14, 2019)

IBMs purchase of Redhat is largely an attempt to buy relevance into the cloud computing space. They've been trying to compete with Oracle and Microsoft for years, and buying a commodity cloud platform would further solidify their place in the market. IBM was also a huge client of Redhat for more than a decade as well, so this was bound to happen at some point. This won't bode well for Red Hat, however IMO.

Anyway, this has very little to do with FreeBSD - I wouldn't concern yourself much with it.


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## ralphbsz (Aug 14, 2019)

(Warning: Opinions coming up).

I actually disagree. RedHat is not a big cloud provider. They neither have the necessary cloud data center capacity, nor the breadth of services that are required today. The 400# gorilla in this market is Amazon AWS. Look sometime what they have: data centers in every corner of the planet, extremely good networking, super-efficient custom hardware, and all kinds of software. One thing I've been particularly impressed with is the content delivery (streaming) platforms they provide, and the cloud-scale and NoSQL data bases. They can do what Oracle dreams of, at a scale 1000x larger than what an Oracle database can possibly do, and do it efficiently (with low CPU and RAM and network utilization). They are what the IT industry needs today, and what everyone tries to compete with.

What does RedHat have? An OS, and a few optional software components. And a large support organization: if your Linux machine crashes, and you were running RHEL and paid for the annual service contract, you get a friendly but not technically very skilled person on the phone, and they'll tell it to powercycle it once, and then reinstall it. They could also kiss it and make it feel better, it wouldn't be much worse. This is the bread and butter of RedHat's business model: phone support for rent. Admittedly, they also have a lot of high-powered FOSS developers on their staff, but it is not clear how you make money with that.

What does IBM have? They are a great computer services company, and I say that being proud of a long and successful career there (I left IBM a few years ago). Unfortunately, they thing they are good at, and used to make a lot of money with (which is to deliver tailor-made computer services, complete soup to nuts) is no longer a money making machine, and that market is shrinking rapidly. They pretend to have artificial intelligence, cloud, the internet, and all that stuff, but those are fundamentally lies: at its core, IBM is still a very customer-focused IT building organization. Some of it is today actually cloud based (IBM both provides clouds using its own data centers, as well as helping large customers run in-house clouds), but that's not important; what is important is the high-touch high-trust business model.

Now you take those two companies and smash them together. You will have large losses, because you have too much management, and very different cultures. And while they are "complementary" (there isn't much overlap), there is very little there that can be used in today's computer marketplace. I can over-simplify it: Neither of them was able to compete with Amazon AWS by themselves, for lack of relevant technology, relevant innovation, sufficient scale, and suitable culture. Putting them together won't help either.

I like to compare it to the merger of HP (at that time, mostly a desktop and laptop company, with a printer business and a small enterprise and services part) with Compaq (exact same description, except fewer printers and more servers). Both were people floating in the ocean after a shipwreck, unable to swim, and slowly sinking. How does putting them together help? Well, it doesn't, and it didn't work: The combined company continued sinking, until new management stopped the bleeding by fragmenting it; todays smaller and focussed companies may actually survive.

So why did HP's management merge with Compaq? Why is IBM merging with RedHat? I think at the core is exactly the same logic: Everyone knew back then that HP was failing, and that IBM is failing now. Everyone (namely the investors and the public) was putting the fault squarely at the current management, where it belongs. And by that I don't just mean the one CEO (Fiorina or Rometty), but the whole bench and the corporate culture that creates this management. While the BoD is still in the pocket of the CEOs (in both cases, powerful CEOs have appointed only sycophants to the board), the investors are slowly getting impatient. In both cases, there was serious talk about the CEO being about to be fired, for the ship sinking ever faster, but with a sycophant board the firing is delayed. So how does the top management save their ass? They can't, because at the core the companies they are leading are incapable of surviving in their current form, with the current management culture. But they can buy themselves a few year delay of the inevitable firing, but doing something really big and really crazy. Because after something YUUUUUGE like the Compaq or RedHat mergers, the current management needs to be given two or three years to see how it succeeds. I think they're just irrationally happening that a miracle happens now. In both cases, I think those ill-advised mergers will break the companies even further, and make the recovery afterwards even harder. And since I have many friends that worked at HP at the time (I'm also a former HP employee), and who work at IBM now, this makes me sad.


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## Crivens (Aug 14, 2019)

ralphbsz What you write reminds me of this fungus that infects ants and drives them to suicide. The bigger the company bureaucracy, the more toxic becomes the C level...

I once had a psychological study about the profiles of long term inhabitants of #9 and those dwelling a certain crown owned habitat "to her majesties pleasure" (iow : for ever). Seems like the makeup of high profile career politicans and same level criminals is the same (high functional sociopath). C level seems no different. Let's sink this company and some more, so we can get our wonga some month longer. 

In the end, they all sell know how and experience. But that is bound to people and not a company. So lets see how much of it rubs off before those holding it call it a day.


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## kpedersen (Aug 14, 2019)

I remember reading about this "memo" sent around IBM when one of the upper managers was visiting. It is talked about on the register.





						IBM memo to staff: Our CEO Ginni is visiting so please 'act normally!'
					

Leaked missive insists 'no selfies, no bathroom run-ins or elevator pitches' with Rometty




					www.theregister.co.uk
				




Was this really the case? That kind of corporate "worship" must be quite suffocating and unproductive. I possibly would contribute this culture to why IBM hasn't really managed to ignite the passion of its developers since the golden age.


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## ralphbsz (Aug 14, 2019)

We had CEO visits several times. While we never got a memo about "inappropriate behavior", the level of preparation sounds about right. For about a week before the visit, facilities groups prepare things: carpets are steam cleaned, hallways repainted, and so on.


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## Crivens (Aug 14, 2019)

In the south of Berlin there is a road where all buildings were in good repair up to around second floor - exactly as much as you could see from a limo driving you from the politbureau to your datscha... sounds familiar?


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## CraigHB (Aug 14, 2019)

Kind of drives home the point, doesn't matter how good things ~are~, matters how good they appear to be.


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## Birdy (Aug 18, 2019)

Sevendogsbsd said:


> Google isn't evil, just a information gathering company. I am sure there are far worse companies out there.


You might reconsider that. Here's why: see here and here. It changed from a search engine to a propaganda platform.


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## Phishfry (Aug 18, 2019)

> owning the stock amounts to a gamble on whether management can successfully absorb Red Hat into the company.











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Get the latest news and analysis in the stock market today, including national and world stock market news, business news, financial news and more




					www.nasdaq.com


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## Crivens (Aug 18, 2019)

Birdy said:


> You might reconsider that. Here's why: see here and here. It changed from a search engine to a propaganda platform.


Just check who gave them their venture capital...


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## CraigHB (Aug 18, 2019)

I used to hate the most on Microsoft.  Google pushed them out of the most hated spot for me.  Though I have disdain for all large corporations so it's not hard for me to dislike any of them.  There's plenty of others that can give Google a run for the most hated spot.


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## scottro (Aug 18, 2019)

Whether any of them are actively evil (though MS might have been and may still be) or simply indifferent to anything but profit, the result seems to be the same.  I feel as if RedHat at least gave lip service to being good, I don't know what will happen now.   
In the 80's or 90's Staples drove all the small stationers out of business and probably around that time Barnes and Noble did the same to most bookstores. Amazon seems evil to me but in a way they seem as they giving Staples and Barnes & Noble what those two gave their competitors.  Amazon as karmic justice?


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## CraigHB (Aug 18, 2019)

scottro said:


> or simply indifferent to anything but profit,



I wouldn't say they intentionally set out on an evil path, but that's not the problem.  It's as you stated, all concerns are secondary to profit. The bigger the corporation, the greater the drive to profit at the cost of everything else.  That results in quite a bit of evil conduct right there.


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## CraigHB (Aug 18, 2019)

For sure that's what it comes down to, power.  We all want it in some way or another.  In my case it's only for machines.  I have zero interest in controlling the behavior of others and I just don't understand why so many people seem to be obsessed with that.  It's my biggest complaint with our culture.


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## freq (Aug 18, 2019)

getopt said:


> The experience of pure power is much more satisfactory than anything else, including orgasm. That is the way of thinking that makes persons of interest grabbing pussies without the fear ever to be sanctioned.



Who ever actually grabbed one?


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## Crivens (Aug 18, 2019)

CraigHB said:


> I have zero interest in controlling the behavior of others and I just don't understand why so many people seem to be obsessed with that.  It's my biggest complaint with our culture.


 You may want to read up on Narcistic Personality Disorder. Quite an eye opener, and such stuff should be part of the school curiculum.


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## freq (Aug 18, 2019)

getopt said:


> Narcistic(!) ? That one you find on most school yards even without any curriculum.



The most effective way of transporting your idea to the public is be convincing them that they need to transport it. All those who aspire to capitalize must bend toward Narcissism. Money is the basis of motives quite often. Narcissism reigns supreme.


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