Years ago, my employer at the time collaborated with IBM on a plan to develop the first 64-bit Unix when such a thing was still a ways off. and we did it. But then IBM chased no sales, generated no revenue, suggesting the 2-year effort was just a boondoogle my employer had to financially foot without dying, then held on to the source in a vault and that would be that…

… except they allegedly released some private source code to the world and had to build an entire astroturf ‘news’ site to defend their position to excitable hippies who gladly took up the flag, and when my employer died from the costly litigation, they were also hated as well. Lie back and think of England, I guess. #pamelaWasAPlant

Like all the big corporations IBM has bought a lot of small competitors in the past. Red Hat was the only name widely known to the public because IBM targets are software tools for business or the backend of the enterprise infrastructure.

Here there is a list of all their acquisitions.

Meanwhile from the beginning of the years 2000s they decided they wanted to become a consultancy company and rely more on external developers (especially from Indian companies). Internal developers slowly became demoralised in the middle of repeated rounds of redundancies, the quality of their services declined and they lost a lot of clients.

You may see IBM as an innovative company, a little bit for their past reputation and a little bit for the recent advanced projects they announced. But although they have some very advanced research centers the bulk of their work is the one they carry out on the client sites. That part of their work is lagging behind. At the end of the '90s you could find many big companies around the world that handed over to IBM almost all their IT systems. Now it does not happen any more. They are one of the many providers.

They are driven by quarterly earnings. No company can be successful long term when focusing on maximum profit in the next three months. So they buy a company at the top and ride the money wave until they aren’t profitable, then sell the name or IP to another company, lather, rinse, repeat.

They did this with PCs, Storage, big data, Healthcare tech, etc etc. Now they are squeezing the last money juice out the cloud acquisitions because the market is saturated with viable competitors. They will do the same with AI and Quantum Computing in the future.

It is a viable strategy if you are big enough. Broadcom, and before them, Symantec are other examples.

Profit > Innovation