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