IBM to buy RedHat

[Jerry Wolper]

He’s basically updating the “Apple buys NeXT” story from the mid-90s.

Apple was

much bigger and better known, but was having some financial woes after

some

management mis-steps. Within a couple of years, nearly every Apple exec

was

gone, replaced by people from NeXT. The Mac OS was replaced by NeXTSTEP,
which was re-christened as OS X.

Wasn't one of those people at NeXT Steve Jobs? It's much easier to
transform the culture when you were instrumental in originally establishing
it.

Hey, I guess it could happen. ;-)

It could, but it seems unlikely that a culture as entrenched as the one at
IBM will suddenly flip, for better or worse. I would imagine that mainframe
salespeople will still be in their blue suits when pushing big iron to
other corporate behemoths.

-Jerry


--- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts ---
multipart/alternative
text/plain (text body -- kept)
text/html
---

_______________________________________________
Post Messages to: ***@leafe.com
Subscription Maintenance: http://mail.leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox
OT-free version of this list: http://mail.leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech
Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox
This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/CAKSNnOHpLMvEq5LyKK7K_p_+***@mail.gmail.com
** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too st

[Charlie-gm]

I know Ed was responding kind of tongue-in-cheek, but I thought I would
add on Jerry's response.

Based on my experience, culture is by FAR the more determinant factor to
predict results of a corporate acquisition. Corporate culture very
rarely, if ever, changes over the life of a company (of 4 companies that
I have direct experience where they tried to change the "culture", all 4
failed to change it - that's 100% failure - but, of course, it was only
4 companies - yes, I'm generalizing <g>). Very small companies are the
only ones that have a reasonable chance of culture-changeability, and
IBM is not small.

So, the culture of IBM is definitely NOT in line with open source
software (yeah, yeah, they've donated, blah blah, but their soul has
already been sold <g>). How will that play out? Maybe something like
Java. And that will probably mean new open source distros get branched
off the latest Red Hat prior to IBM's purchase. Or maybe IBM will truly
focus on charging only for support. But my guess is their bean-counters
will not allow much time (cost) be spent on the OS if they are not going
to charge just to buy it. And that means the IBM version of the OS will
probably stagnate.

-Charlie

Post by Jerry Wolper
It could, but it seems unlikely that a culture as entrenched as the one at
IBM will suddenly flip, for better or worse. I would imagine that mainframe
salespeople will still be in their blue suits when pushing big iron to
other corporate behemoths.
-Jerry

_______________________________________________
Post Messages to: ***@leafe.com
Subscription Maintenance: http://mail.leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox
OT-free version of this list: http://mail.leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech
Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox
This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/dcb2f5a1-0252-7f47-56ae-***@gmail.com
** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.