Confluent was trading at less than 50% of its IPO price when IBM made the offer. The stock and the company has been going sideways for several years now, keeps growing revenues but loses even more as most of it is in Sales and Marketing. In which world is this seen as some sort of extraordinary company that will get sabotaged by IBM. Seems Confluent management knows the writing on the wall, IBM will clean up (fire a bunch of sales and management guys) and make this a workable business. It will seem <i>brutal</i> for some Confluent guys but that's because their business is broken; and only someone from outside can come in and fix it as the current senior management cannot.<p>IBM has been around for over a hundred years, maybe they know a thing or two about running a software business :-)
I joined IBM over 40 years ago, like my pappy before me.<p>My main takeaway from IBM's longevity is just how astonishingly long big companys' death rattles can be, not how great IBM are at running software businesses.
To me it makes sense when it comes to the stock. It's not like someone goes to Robinhood or whatever and goes... Hey you know what's underrated? Kafka! Calls on Confluent!
Not a Hacker News take I would have expected 10 years ago. Today, though. I agree.
This is so fascinating to me. I mean how IBM keeps taking over other companies, but they consistently deliver low quality/bottom-tier services and products. Why do they keep doing the same thing again and again? How are they generating actual revenue this way?<p>Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house. Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic are doing, with in-house tools? They have a mature PowerPC (Power9+? now?)setup, lots of talent to make ML/LLMs work and lots of existing investment in datacenters and getting GPU-intense workloads going.<p>I don't disagree that this acquisition is good strategy, I'm just fascinated (Schadenfreude?) to witness the demise of confluent now. I think economists should study this, it might help avert larger problems.
Watson was a marketing exercise designed to sell a bunch of disconnected text and image processing libraries pulled together by consulting services. It did not function as advertised.<p>At one point we worked with a large energy company that was basically sold something LLM-like (large-scale indexing and searching/querying of documents) in 2016 or so. IBM had a team of 90 people doing full-time data ingestion for something like 26,000 documents. We got asked to do a counter-product in two weeks, which was literally just a TF-IDF search and some smarts around ingesting different types of documents. Both solutions performed approximately equally, except one cost something in the order of $185m and one cost $40k. Watson continued running for about a year until an external data science contractor realised they could query Watson for highly confidential board meeting notes, and it would provide full previews into the documents. The project was shuttered shortly after.<p>Alas, nobody gets fired for hiring IBM.
Why in the world would economists need to study this? It's been known that large bureaucracies have been dysfunctional for over a couple of decades now if not centuries. The large reason is because 1) the incentives to do great work are not there (most of the credit for a huge company's success goes to the CEO who gets 100X the salary of a regular worker while delivering usually pretty much nothing) 2) politics usually plays a huge role which gives a huge advantage to your competition (i.e. your competition needs to spend less time on politics and more time on the actual product) and 3) human beings don't functionally work well in groups larger than 100-250 due to the overwhelming complexity of the communication needed in order to make this type of structure work. Incentives though I think are the primary driver - most people at companies like IBM don't have any incentives to actually care about the product they produce and that's the secret behind the ruin of almost every large company.<p>Edit: you also seem to be giving too much credence to Watson. Watson was actually mostly a marketing tool designed to win in Jeopardy and nothing else. It was constructed specifically to compete in that use-case and was nowhere near to the architecture of a general transformer which is capable of figuring out meta-patterns within language and structurally understanding language. You can read about Watson's design and architecture here if you're curious: <a href="https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs4740/2011sp/papers/AIMagazine-DeepQA.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs4740/2011sp/papers/AIMa...</a>
More like we need psychologists to ask "why are companies still working with IBM's efficiencies 30 years after its peak?" The workers don't have to care but the businesses dealing with IBM should.
I may be wrong but I think it's mostly for things like enterprise support in case something goes wrong. IBM has had a large footprint in enterprises (WebSphere MQ, etc). People don't want disruptions in case your own kafka cluster with in-house engineers accountable for everything. So having enterprise support for product/ infra gives a sense of safety. At times rightly so. Depends on a lot of factors- risk appetite, capabilities of in-house engineers, what's at stake, and mostly psychological safety, etc.
> most of the credit for a huge company's success goes to the CEO who gets 100X the salary of a regular worker while delivering usually pretty much nothing<p>Well, in Confluent's case I'm not so sure that's true given that their CEO is also the company founder as well as one of the original authors of Apache Kafka.
> they consistently deliver low quality/bottom-tier services and products<p>I worked with IBMers. The main priority for a lot of them is to ensure continuous employment for themselves and their buddies. They'd add unnecessary complexity to a product to stretch out the development for another couple of years. And they work at leisure pace for tech. Actual 9 to 5, many coffee breaks. They can't compete.
> And they work at leisure pace for tech. Actual 9 to 5, many coffee breaks.<p>Ultra-based. We should all be so lucky.
"Actual 9 to 5", meaning the standard 40 hour work week?<p>If someone is telling you to work more than 40 hours a week in a salaried position, and they're not paying <i>out the nose</i>, you're being scammed.
I worked with IBM several decades ago for a customer project, and the solution suggested by an IBM'er for backing up a NoSQL database (Lotus Notes) on a daily basis was to translate and migrate the data to a relational one (DB2), then use a DB2 tape backup system to back it up.<p>When I pointed out that this was a stupid way to do it, they openly told me that they just wanted to sell DB2.
They will die happy knowing they did more than just create shareholder value.
The way you put it, looks like IBM is a pretty good place to work at
Aside from having like 9 managers, 8 of whom are totally purposeless in your professional life, then yeah it’s not bad. The benefits are good.<p>I worked with some pretty talented and dedicated people at IBM. The “hop on a 2am call to put out a fire because they happened to check their email and they owed the person on pager duty a beer” kind of people.<p>That company was a red tape rats nest, but that’s management’s fault. And you get lazy people or shit departmental culture at various points in nearly every company, but painting a tens-of-thousands strong workforce with that brush is ridiculous.
Sounds miserable if you like solving real problems.
I do advisory for pre-Series A startups as a last ditch effort to save them.<p>I do not get the unified industry delusion about "why X company has a bad product". It is usually either one of two things: comfort or ego. Everyone knows that but do not want to say it out loud.<p>I have seen these happen time and time again. Companies that are cash cow, do not care to do a better job. There is no incentive to do a better job. Moreover, the recurring thing is that if I did something different, I wouldn't have been this much successful in the first place.<p>The rest of the smart consultants walk on eggshells. They hint at stuff but never want to bite the hand that feeds them because the clients would rather fire you than be challenged.<p>It is not an IBM thing; it's generic business thing to some degree. I really have to call this a delusion. Good consultants submit generic reports that just tell them what they want to hear. It is not you; it is the economy. Stupid consultants that are well-meaning tell them they should be the best on competitor intel. Do you not think some stupid person did not approach IBM to do what Oracle or AWS is doing? Of course, they did, and they were fired immediately.<p>The best consultants are less of a consultant and more of a therapist.<p>After doing only four-month projects for the entire year, this year's realization was that nobody in the industry wants to do better. Everyone is in their place because of ego or a perceived sense of success. Or because of a grand conspiracy theory. IBM has a significant number of government contracts, so they are set for life because the vast majority government IT systems are pigeonholed into IBM systems. The acquisition is to tell the shareholders that we are so successful that we can literally buy companies. We do not even care to do things. Whatever the new thing is, we will buy it at some point.
Sounds like the German government. Or probably other governments as well.
I'll say this about IBM: because it's so old, it was the most diverse company I ever worked for- including age, nationality, race, sex, and any other category you can think of. Basically you had all types of people in all stages of life, not just young white workaholic tech-bros. The founders are long gone, so everyone there (including CEO) is a professional- meaning nobody has any kind of personal attachment to the company. We were all in the same boat, as it were. When your older coworker suddenly disappears due to a stroke, it puts things in perspective.<p>The fast-paced startup is really the hack, combining the energy of youth with the ego-mania of their founders. Ask yourself, is it healthy?<p>Anyway, IBM's customers tend to be other fortune 100s and governments- basically other similar organizations, and my experience was that we took care of them pretty well. The products were not pretty (no Steve Jobs-like person to enforce beauty), and rather complex due to all the enterprise requirements. But they were quite high quality, particularly the hardware.
>> Actual 9 to 5, many coffee breaks<p>Found my dream job :-)
We should all be so blessed. :pray:
Everything will make sense when you realize that IBM is a consulting company. They don't care about building great products. In fact building self-serve products will directly take away from their consulting revenue. They instead need to be good at marketing and selling their services. Watson was exactly that - a marketing demo that got them in the news cycle and helped them sell a giant wave of contracts under a single brand to unsuspecting CIOs of legacy non-tech companies. Every acquisition helps with this goal. Red Hat - locking companies into licenses and support contracts for the OS. HashiCorp & Confluent - locking companies into support contracts for their cloud infra.
>> <i>Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? [...] Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic are doing, with in-house tools?</i><p>> <i>Everything will make sense when you realize that IBM is a consulting company.</i><p>This <i>and</i>.<p>The 'and' being that consulting companies, in their DNA, build solutions for <i>their customers</i>.<p>Which is a very different business than building products for <i>all users</i>.<p>Not least because the former is guided by understanding a customer's requirements, while the later is having a strong intuition (backed up by market fit) about what all users want.<p>I'm pretty sure there might not be a full end user capable (in the sense of design-build-iterate) product team in IBM at this point.<p>Mostly because I don't think they've any middle/upper management that can think that way. They've got the engineers!
The service part you are likely referring to is now Kyldryl, a separate company. IBM now focus on software and cloud. There are still services but are much less prominent.
> Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house<p>I do. I remember going to a chat once where they wanted to get people on-board in using it.
It was 90 minutes of hot air.
They "showed" how Watson worked and how to implement things, and I think every single person in the room knew they were full of it. Imagine we were all engineers and there were no questions at the end.<p>Comparing Watson to LLMs is like comparing a rock to an AIM-9 Sidewinder.
Watson was nothing like ChatGPT. The first iteration was a system specifically built to play Jeopardy. It did some neat stuff with NLP and information retrieval, but it was all still last generation AI/ML technology. It then evolved into a brand that IBM used to sell its consulting services. The product itself was a massive failure because it had no real applications and was too weak as a general purpose chat bot.
I had no idea about what Watson was initially meant to solve.<p>I do remember they tried to sell it - at least in the meeting I went - as a general purpose chatbot.<p>I did try briefly to understand how to use it, but the documentation was horrendous (As in, "totally devoid of any technical information")
Watson was intended to solve fuzzy optimization problems.<p>Unfortunately, the way it solved fuzzy was 'engineer the problem to fit Watson, then engineer the output to be usable.'<p>Which required every project to be a huge custom implementation lift. Similar to early Palantir.
If anyone is curious to see what Watson actually was you can find it here (it was nowhere near to a generalized large langue model -- mostly made for winning in Jeopardy): <a href="https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs4740/2011sp/papers/AIMagazine-DeepQA.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs4740/2011sp/papers/AIMa...</a>
>Why do they keep doing the same thing again and again? How are they generating actual revenue this way?<p>IBM has a ton of Enterprise software, backed by a bunch of consultants hiding in boring businesses/governments.<p>They also do a ton of outsourcing work where they will be big enterprise IT support desk and various other functions. In fact, that side has gotten so big, IBM now has more employees in India in then any other country.
Your fascination seems hinged on the fact that IBM has "lots of talent to make ML/LLMs work" which judging by what they've put out so far and talk publicly about, is very far from the truth. Anyone who has a clue seems to (rightly) have left IBM decades ago, and left are business people who think "Managed to increase margin by 0.1%" is something to celebrate.
It’s a shame because people forget how good IBM research was back in the day. I do wonder if they still have great people in those r&d labs, or if they all left.
There are good people in IBM. But they don't have the resources behind them anymore. Look at the market cap of ms, Amazon. Google, meta et al, compared to IBM.
To be a bit more candid, they have lots of employees outside of the US (particularly in India). and both in the US and elsewhere, people need to eat. They may not have the talent to innovate new tech like OpenAI and others, or do cutting-edge R&D, but they certainly have the talent to take LLM breakthroughs and adapt. They could have competed with many of the B-Tier LLM services out there with the right leadership.
> but they certainly have the talent to take LLM breakthroughs and adapt<p>I'll believe that when I see it. They had a decade headstart with all of this, and yeah, could have been at the forefront. But they're not, and because of the organization itself, they're unlikely to have a shot at even getting close to there. Seems they know this themselves too, as they're targeting the lower end of the market now with their Granite models, rather than shooting for the stars and missing, like they've done countless of times before.
> Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house. Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic are doing, with in-house tools?<p>Leadership in IBM also thought that Watson was like what what OAI/Anthropic/Google are doing now. It wasn't. Watson was essentially a ML pipeline over-optimized on Jeopardy, which is why it failed in literally every other domain.<p>Outside of Jeopardy, Watson was just a brand.
Sure, but they were doing that stuff. They had ML people, infrastructure, marketing, branding,etc... already. Their product sucked, but they could have copy-catted OpenAI in 2022+ like everyone else.
What I'm hearing you say is that IBM is basically just a private equity firm now.
They gave up on watson about 18 months before llm's popped up, and they have simply just not got enough cash on hand to compete. While the big boys grew fantastically bigger over the past 15 years as cloud happened ibm fumbled time after time and shrank ever smaller, and is now desperately hoping it can stay relevant. but in the end they just haven't got the resources to compete on that stage anymore.
The recent interview with Arvind had the “grapes are too green, anyway” energy. They missed the train because they were licking their Watson wounds. Then sorta regretted it but it’s too late.<p>Same thing happened with their cloud offering. They laughed at AWS, then tried to catch up, then missed and pivoted to “hybrid” (cloud and local).
If they hadn't sold the ThinkPad (and related) brands I would care.
IBM is where good (acquired) software goes to die. RIP Clearcase.
Have you seen Office Space? I'm sure it was based on IBM
To add to that i think their R&D labs along with HPE were one of the few to innovate on the memristor and actually build some fascinating concept machines.If i rememeber HPE's was 'The Machine'.<p>Athough i think they just di/dont know how to adapt these to market that isnt a enterprise behemoth , rather than develop/price it so more devs can take a hold and experiment.
There are entire niches of us that make a living (not at IBM) making certain IBM products actually do what they're supposed to. From my vantage point I see essentially zero maintenance going on with their products. I sincerely don't understand the market (why do people keep paying hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for non-existent support?) - but whatever.
Just to be clear, you honestly believe that IBM does no maintenance.<p>For my package on one VERSION alone: <a href="https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/src/kernel/centos-stream-10" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/src/kernel/centos-st...</a><p>I dont know if you were trying to be funny, or simply dont understand how much change really goes on.
Power10-based processors are manufactured by Samsung using a 7 nm process
I’m pretty convinced there is a bell curve of “understanding what IBM does” where idiots and geniuses both have absolutely no idea.<p>It really is probably that strangest company in tech which you think could be mysterious and intriguing. But no one cares. It’s like no one wants to look behind the boring suit and see wtf. From my low point on that bell curve I can’t see how they are even solvent.
In Sweden, IBM makes a shit tonne of money from SAP implementation consulting.
They have some real money printers that most probably haven't heard of. IBM Maximo for example dominates some industries the way SAP and Salesforce does.
Genuine question: how did the IBM acquisitions of Red Hat and HashiCorp turn out?<p>For Red Hat, there's no longer an official "public" distribution of RHEL, but apart from that they seemingly have been left alone and able to continue to develop their own products. But that's only my POV as a user of OSS Red Hat products at home and of RHEL and OpenShift at work.
We moved off HashiCorp's Terraform Cloud when they tried to hike the price 100x on us, although that was technically pre-acquisition I think (it was their move to resource-based pricing). In talking with our account manager, they basically said they only really cared about enterprise accounts, and that migrating away would probably make sense for us.<p>HashiCorp also changed their licenses to non-open-source licenses, but again I think this was technically pre-acquisition (I think as they were gearing up to be a more attractive target for an exit).
In addition to this, I’ve noticed that OpenTofu is gaining much more interesting features and are actually acting upon long-requested functionality that HashiCorp has refused to implement (example: provider for_each in 1.9.0)
> (I think as they were gearing up to be a more attractive target for an exit).<p>A common conspiracy theory, but not true.
> were gearing up to be a more attractive target for an exit<p>An "exit" from the public market?
Former-Hashi employee here: there's a clear prioritization of enterprise products. So much so that I would not be surprised if they stopped supporting the Open Source projects entirely. That would be a big boost for the forks.<p>Red Hat has far more autonomy. We are not structured the same.<p>On the HR side — many good people are leaving; new hires have to be on-site for 3 days and located in 4 "strategic" locations in the US.
The argument has been made that the real value of RH lies in the people working there. And if IBM were to interfere too heavy-handedly, those people would just leave, and RH would become basically worthless.
Maybe that's how it should work, but it's not how it actually works.<p>The culture makes the company. Everyone on the lower rungs of the org chart knows this, because it's what they live and breathe every day. A positive, supportive workplace culture with clear goals and relative autonomy is a thing of beauty. You routinely find people doing more work than they really have to because they believe in the mission, or their peers, or the work is just fun. People join the company (and stay) because they WANT to not because they have to.<p>Past a certain company size, upper management NEVER sees this. They are always looking outward: strategy, customers, marketing, competition. Never in. They've been trained to give great motivational speeches that instill a sense of company pride and motivation for about 30 seconds. After that, employee morale is HR's job.<p>I have worked in a company that got acquired while it was profitable. The culture change was slow but dramatic. We went from a fun, dynamic culture with lots of teamwork and supportive management, to one step or two above Office Space. As far as the acquiring company was concerned, everything we were doing didn't matter, even if it worked. We had to conform to their systems and processes, or find new jobs. Most of us eventually did the latter.<p>Somehow Red Hat seems to be a notable exception. Although IBM owns Red Hat, they seem to have mostly left it alone instead of absorbing it. The name "IBM" doesn't even appear on redhat.com. Because I'm an outsider, I can't say whether IBM meddled in Red Hat's HR or management, but I would guess not.
> no longer an official "public" distribution of RHEL<p>What do you mean by that, like "centos/stream" (aka <a href="https://www.centos.org/download/" rel="nofollow">https://www.centos.org/download/</a> ) ?
Well, there is CentOS Stream:<p><a href="https://www.centos.org/centos-stream/" rel="nofollow">https://www.centos.org/centos-stream/</a><p>And Fedora is still the upstream of RHEL, nothing changed there.
I migrated our company off Terraform to Pulumi as a direct result of the acquisition.
Gnome has stagnated significantly.
The people on the Red Hat desktop team that work on GNOME are killing it. I think you might not be paying attention. Not every change is visible.
I'm not sure this is bad? It's still maintained, and it isn't like there are frequent revolutions in UI design - if it works, it works.<p>Slow and boring is a pretty nice place to be.
The Gnome desktop that shipped with Solaris over two decades ago is just as useful, possibly more useful, as the tablet-oriented hamburger menu UI of today.<p>Yes, two decades: <a href="https://adtmag.com/articles/2003/08/04/solaris-gets-a-gnome-of-its-own.aspx" rel="nofollow">https://adtmag.com/articles/2003/08/04/solaris-gets-a-gnome-...</a>
If only it had stagnated around gnome 2.0.
Has it? I feel like Gnome has made great progress the last few years
>> Gnome has stagnated significantly.<p>GTK is still alive. It seems like Cosmic desktop with GTK apps will be a reasonable path forward. Of course there's KDE and QT, but I mean as an alternative to those.
Could that be due to increased popularity of KDE?
Linux on the desktop isn't a lucrative business
“With the acquisition of Confluent, IBM will provide the smart data platform for enterprise IT, purpose-built for AI.”<p><a href="https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-12-08-ibm-to-acquire-confluent-to-create-smart-data-platform-for-enterprise-generative-ai" rel="nofollow">https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-12-08-ibm-to-acquire-confluent...</a><p>I don't understand how this acquisition is relevant for AI.
Every time an executive says AI the number goes up.
Event-driven AI decision making is the C-suite wet dream. A large % of major orgs run Kafka for their eventing systems.
Streaming, EDA can solve lot of data challenges for enterprise AI use cases
It's depressing how IBM always uses the same language with every single acquisition. They don't care about the actual tech, only the patents and the ability to resell it.
As I read the release, it just sounded like "something something something data, something something something AI."<p>AI is just the lastest buzzword. Everyone has it, because they have to. Don't look behind the curtain.
You can double your company's value by saying it's an AI company. Easiest, simplest way to create value.
Anything today has to contain the word "AI" otherwise it simply won't be considered.
They probably have cursor licenses
AI Agent for Kafka Consumer group<p>/s
IBM have an absolutely stellar record of blowing acquisitions. The highly motivated newly acquired team will be in honeymoon phase for 3 months, and then it slowly dawns on them that they’ve joined an unbelievably rigid organization where things like customer satisfaction and great products don’t matter at all. Then they’ll be in shock and disbelief at the mind boggling Byzantine rules and internal systems they have to use, whose sole purpose is to make sure nobody does anything. Finally, the core IBM sales force will start to make demands on them and will short to ground any vestiges of energy, time, opportunity and motivation they might have left. The good team members will leave and join a former business partner, or decide to spend more time with the family. They’ll meet often at the beginning to relive the glory days of pre-acquisition and recount times where they went went above and beyond for that important early customer. But then these meetings will become fewer and fewer. Finally they’ll find a way of massaging their resumes to cast the last years as being “at the heart of AI infrastructure”.
Yeah, they acquired the company I worked at and left us alone for a year or two. Each year would get worse though, and each year we swapped nearly all bureaucratic things around. Always a different way to do performance reviews goals, etc.<p>A lot of the successful projects at the original company are now dead.<p>It's also weird being in IBM, because if your "contract" ends they put you on the bench. Then you basically have to job hunt within IBM, and if you can't find anything within a month or so you are out. It's super weird.
"It's also weird being in IBM, because if your "contract" ends they put you on the bench. Then you basically have to job hunt within IBM, and if you can't find anything within a month or so you are out. It's super weird."<p>This is standard operating procedure at most consulting/professional services firms.
Yes, the bench sounds great but it is incredibly nerve-wracking and I never liked that aspect of consulting at all. Better to just go to zero pay and be a free agent and if the company finds you another gig, great, but no promises either way.
I retired a couple of years ago at 54 and now spend my days feeding horses, mucking stalls and spreading the resulting manure (a task consulting prepared me for), but for about 24 of my 30 year career prior to retiring I worked for consulting companies and was lucky enough to never sit on the bench.
Also the CIA
Sounds similar to university applied research arms too.<p>GTRI locally hires a lot of non-students to work in its various labs. Its labs then pitch ideas to private companies and the DoD. Sometimes they're solicited directly if the lab is well-known and has a track record of delivering good research-oriented results. They research and build prototypes around various capabilities: robotics, avionics, even classified stuff.<p>They're always pitching, because contracts end or fall through, and that's the source of everyone's payroll. The labs can even be competitive with one another, and the individual researchers might spend time split between labs.<p>Academics as a service.
I don’t know how many contracts IBM deals with, but the concept of a bench is very common in government contracting. It helps retain talent in an environment that’s more volatile than a typical office. Good for the company to avoid brain drain and hiring overhead, good for the employee because it’s a built-in safety net. Much better than your contract ending and immediately being out of a job, especially in today’s market
I don't think they're objecting to the idea of a bench as an ultimate fallback; I think they're objecting to the idea that there isn't, during such "internal layoffs", a default automatic reassignment of all headcount to other teams. In such cases, you would only land on the bench if you refuse the automatic reassignment.
Longer Bench allowed only for consultant with security clearance as those are such a hard thing to come by. General govt work, they just let you go like in commercial sector.
Those are the positives. The downside is that the sales team presents you with really lousy contract opportunities and you are pressured to accept one knowing it is a crap assignment that isn't helping your career growth. And you can be stuck on one of those for years!
Surely by now everyone, including non-developers and non-software people, know exactly what IBM is, and you don't sell to IBM/join IBM without knowing exactly what's about to happen. No one joins IBM today and thinks there will be a huge focus on customer satisfaction or focus on great product design, it's all about squeezing maximum profit out of products until you need to discontinue them because you chased away all of the customers.
Not wrong but the image that people are painting in the comments is getting close to a caricature now.<p>The stuff IBM is doing on Quantum Computing is serious cutting-edge science and engineering for instance. The R&D they are doing on semiconductors on their 2nm and sub-2nm processes is also impressive and hardcore tech. They are doing a bunch of progress on post-quantum cryptography and homomorphic encryption. They've fallen behind now, but they were also quite strong on pre-LLM NLP for a couple of decades, it was not all fluff.<p>Yes they have an awful enterprise culture and they are not focused on building excellent products. But what they offer fits the needs of many organizations, and a lot of the things they are doing on R&D are no joke.
IBM shouldn't be thought of as a singular company. It is a conglomerate that does widely distinct things. Some enterprise boring profit squeezing, some shady scam "IBM blockchain on Z OS prevents viruses," some research/patent efforts elsewhere.<p>That said the GP is spot on for this sort of acquisition we know what will happen and has nothing to do with 2nm research division.
> IBM shouldn't be thought of as a singular company. It is a conglomerate that does widely distinct things.<p>Agreed, like others, small startup I was with, we were acquired years ago and first advice from IBMers who'd been acquired was that IBM is like 1000 smaller companies.
> IBM shouldn't be thought of as a singular company. It is a conglomerate that does widely distinct things.<p>This. Employees in the various sub-companies and divisions usually don't even know who most of the executive leadership is outside their little world. There is no cohesive "IBM" anymore, and I don't think there has been for a very long time.
> The R&D they are doing on semiconductors on their 2nm and sub-2nm processes is also impressive and hardcore tech.<p>But they don't have production. How can they develop successfully without running silicon in a fab?
Doing research? Sure... Maybe. But it doesn't mean they are going to get anywhere to mass production... What was their last huge innovation? On top of that I won't give that much credit for what they do or say they do. Remember how much they lied about many of their "innovations" like IBM Watson?
Scanning Tunneling Microscope, high-temperature superconductivity - 2 Nobel prize right there.<p>Then laser eye surgery, magnetic storage, relational databases, UPC barcodes, DES, FFT, RISC, ...<p>yeah, almost nothing. /s<p>disclaimer: I work for IBM Research and I love every second of it.
> not focused on building excellent products<p>> a lot of the things they are doing on R&D are no joke<p>Sounds a _lot_ like Microsoft too...
I worked for a small company acquired by IBM in 2011. We had a good 5-6 year run where our product sales went up (largely because so many IBM people were selling it) and we were largely left alone. Once things slowed down a bit the IBM rot set in quick though. These days I think all that's left is a skeleton crew maintaining the obligatory long term contracts around the main product, every other part of the original company has been picked clean.
You can measure it by how many management steps you, as an employee of the recently acquired company are from the CEO in the hierarchy. As time goes on, this number tends to increase. It used to be easy to see this in Lotus Sametime or something that had some form of employee directory.
>mind boggling Byzantine rules<p>Hint: by all means possible, make sure you are not the owner of (or manager of the person who owns) any assets beyond your personal laptop. If, for example, you end up being the owner of all the development and test servers of the original company, then it will become your responsibility to ensure that each OS (of each LPAR of each VM) is security compliant, is running the end-point asset manager, and has up to date OS patches, that the DASD is encrypted, and you must periodically show physical proof that the asset still exists and indicate where it's located- photos of assets tags or whatever. It will be your responsibility to dispose of the asset (with all associated paperwork) at the end of its life.<p>It helps if such machines are not actually on the 9. network, or are behind an internal firewall (then they don't care about the security compliance as much).
I'm with a company that was acquired by IBM ~2.5 years ago. The internal systems are definitely rough, but for the most part it's business as usual.<p>I've heard chatter from our engineering leadership that IBM is trying to push some silly initiatives, but we've been able to prioritize the right work so far.<p>I also get more equity (one time award + employee stock purchase plan) than I did previously, and with how IBM stock has been performing lately this has been a net positive for me.<p>FWIW I have heard that IBM used to force their management style on acquisitions in years past, so perhaps this is a fairly recent shift towards a less hands-on approach.
> FWIW I have heard that IBM used to force their management style on acquisitions in years past<p>Definitely wasn't like that for Red Hat. We had a CFO with an IBM past which was a really nice guy and never ever felt like he was parachutes from IBM.<p>Now after 6 years legal, HR and finance will move to IBM starting next January; but my perspective from engineering is that after the acquisition it's been and remains business as usual.<p>I have no idea how it was for Hashicorp.
Haven't heard a damn thing about "RedHat" in years, though. It's dead as far as Linux distros go. I'm sure it's used in the IBM-o-sphere, but I'm just not around that at all.
Yep, this is a classic acquisition story. You go from a hungry company out there to fight to succeed and join a big corp where most projects are just endless series of meetings people have about what they want to do without any real timeline or immediate plan to start.<p>The worst is when your sales team (and all of its super valuable institutional knowledge of your specific market) are cut, and all your management is laid off so that the new corp's managers (who have embedded themselves into the corporate bureaucracy like a trichinosis worm) can treat all your teams as free headcount.<p>Soon, your company, which was acquired for growth, can't do anything and turns into an albatross around the new corp's neck. So the layoffs begin.
<p><pre><code> > ...and internal systems they have to use, whose sole purpose is to make sure nobody does anything
</code></pre>
I once had to use Lotus Notes after the company I was at was acquired by the now defunct Computer Sciences Corporation. I decided I would never, <i>ever</i> work for another company that used Lotus Notes.
A lot of people seem to voice a disdain for Notes but I actually liked it for some reason.
Notes was pretty decent as a groupware/ nosql platform. Lotus script wasn’t great. I might be biased because my first CS job was to write applications with it.<p>It felt like they basically tacked on the email functionality to to Notes to sell it, but it always seemed kinda ok to me.
That's because your comment is only 3 levels deep.<p>Let's revisit this when it's Reply to Reply to Reply to Reply :)
The worst ever product: IBM FileNet! What an awful product. An acquisition, btw.
Hasn't Notes been sluffed off to HCL?
I hope Hashicorp survives. A few higher ups I’ve talked to there made it seem like IBM wants to learn from them, not force their old ways onto Hashicorp. We’ll see. That one is still pretty new.
They said the same thing about Red Hat. The fact that Whitehurst resigned from IBM should tell you something.
They tell that to every company they buy
Judging from what my contacts say, I would not hold my breath. HCP is going to get smashed by bureaucracy and bigcorp bs just like all other IBM acquisitions. All you have to do to verify this is look at linkedin and track the departures of the the acquired staff.
HCP wasn't any prize when they got bought, though, right? HashiCorp Cloud was more like a fog in terms of growth. A bunch of products got lost a long the way (Boundary? Waypoint?) HCP lost 50% of its IPO value by the time it was bought. Yes, I know IPO's are high and always go down, but it went from around a $14bn valuation to being bought for something like $6.5bn.
Not to mention HashiCorp bled talent before the acquisition was even announced (BUSL started it) and it didn’t really stop as far as I’m aware.
I never quite figured out why IBM even bought them. Terraform? Wasn’t there an open source clone by that point?
Not to be cynical but that's said a lot in acquisitions by bigger companies to motivate some people to stay, but just doesn't seem to happen.
And even if there is a 20% of executives actually believe in "We should learn from HashiCorp", usually not even that is enough to counter-act the default mode of operation which is squeezing customers. GLHF to remaining HashiCorp believers, but personally I'd try to find alternatives for the software you use from them if you haven't already.
Usually the internal stakeholder that made the case to acquire the business leaves/gets promoted and new managers come in and start the assimilation process.
And in two years, the acquired management team all leaves like clockwork because they got their retention bonus.
For every incredible journey there is an equal and opposite lesson to be learned
My friends at RedHat were embracing similar forms of copium. By now they've all either moved on or are actively hand sitting while exploring options.
In defense of Byzantines. Their rules and amazing diplomatic prowess is what let them be an empire for so long. The negative connotations to Byzantine comes from the negative perception the west had of them. Byzantines were very practical in regards to who they allied with.
I learned more here and I'm not sure I agree with your comment fully.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/8shw5r/what_is_the_etymology_of_byzantine_how_did_come/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/8shw5r/what_is_t...</a>
I'm sure the children who watched their parents get murdered before they themselves were taken into slavery during the fall of Constantinople appreciated those rules and the alliances they supported.
IBM is designed to milk every last bit of money from their clients. So they need to add new products every now and then to add new money flows.
I've heard IBM is really just an external government agency. If you look at it through the lens of being acquired by a government bureaucracy, then your explanation makes perfect sense. IBM is too entrenched to fail and too poorly run to be acquired.
> They’ll meet often at the beginning to relive the glory days of pre-acquisition and recount times where they went went above and beyond for that important early customer.<p>Yeesh. Which level of hell is that?
Pretty bleak, and describes my experience to a T (although involving other companies). Has there ever been an example where a company has been acquired and culture/morale/conditions have actually improved rather than dissolved?
I wouldn't describe it as improved necessarily, but successfully integrated. This happened many times - youtube by google for example. Facebook acquisitions are pretty successful too (not looking if it was good for humanity, just from business perspective).<p>Some companies like Amazon buy companies and let them run almost independently - IMDB for example, Zappos, Twitch, Whole Foods, Zoox, Audible.
The Apple acquisition of NeXT has (only half-jokingly) been described as NeXT buying Apple with Apple's money. That's obviously an exceptionally rare case.
There were a series of Dilbert comics that spoke to this.<p>Dilbert’s company buys an “artsy” startup (represented by a chap with a goatee and a ponytail).<p>Dilbert comments something like “We get your energy and skill, and we provide … an endless supply of 3-ring binders.”<p>To which the chap replies “I hear that if your name goes into a binder, you lose your soul.”
This feels like the kind of post you can only write with sombre experience.
That's a very cynical take. Unfortunately likely correct.<p>It's a fact that a publicly traded company is beholden to Wall Street and any time such a company would use their earnings for R&D the P/E and margins go down (i.e. spending more money to earn the same) and this is considered a negative signal at Wall Street and the company gets punished in the market.<p>So the only way a company can spend their earnings is to pay dividends or buy assets such as other companies, which then must be squeezed for margins.<p>More here:<p><a href="https://www.cringely.com/2015/06/03/autodesks-john-walker-explained-hp-and-ibm-in-1991/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cringely.com/2015/06/03/autodesks-john-walker-ex...</a>
I had friends that worked at a high-profile IBM acquisition a decade ago and this is exactly what happened.
IBM isn’t really a tech company anymore. More of a legal trolling company that cosplays as tech.<p>They seem to primarily benefit from kickbacks in the form of both leasing and technical contracts for things like opening offices in a location for tax benefits or to promote local economy.<p>Then they see how far they can cut back their end of the contract after the first few months (e.g. Maybe we agreed to have 500 employees in an office, but since nobody is allowed in, we think we can get away with 100 employees.) Then this turns into trolling about how the contract never defines what in office means so can we offshore… Too much undefined confusion, so I guess we get to break the contract but keep what the mayor paid us… Then they just shut down the office and move on to the next location.<p>It seems like the local government must be in on these schemes for leasing. Otherwise this wouldn’t be going on for decades as it has been.<p>The other part of business, technical contracts, is similar except instead of leasing it’s providing some sort of infrastructure coverage for something big. It starts off with good faith fulfilling the contract. Then a few months later it’s like well we have a US military contract that demands US employees but US employees are too expensive. What if we offshore but all the traffic is technically going through a single US employee’s computer which is what the contract technically demands.<p>Then it turns into well we have offshore people working on this anyway, why not just give them direct access and we’ll have a US person overseeing them. Lay everyone else off.<p>Then they see how long they can get away with this until someone gets mad. Then they take one step back to see how close to the technical contract they can get while threatening to abandon the whole thing at the same time.<p>Along with this sort of atmosphere and attitude for the law, it seems we see them constantly doing everything possible to constantly fire old people or anyone else that has legally protected status. So you’ll get statistical analytics on ways to fire protected people based around the constant performance reviews with statistics being used to see how close groups of protected people can be removed without statistically breaking the law. Whatever that algorithm is.<p>That plays into just straight up cutting people, but it also goes into a lot of other subsystems of skirting the law, like if old people can’t relocate as easily then hopping offices and forcing people to relocate 5000 miles is a way they can be eliminated. Part of this might be moving people onto new teams and then saying that team has to be in office for some made up reason, and then firing them for not relocating or using some made up metric like badging timestamps to get them, or some other technicality like leaving for lunch 5 minutes early despite being a salaried employee which is reported as hourly because of tax trolling.<p>I don’t know how IBM still exists because from my perspective it’s pretty clear they’re breaking or at best on razor thin gray line on ice on just about every possible law you could break.
This is what is happening with red hat also?
Maybe a good time to consider alternatives <a href="https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka" rel="nofollow">https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka</a>
I led the engineering team of a large adtech company (TripleLift - order of hundreds of billions of events/day) and we evolved from self hosting Kafka, to paying a vendor (Instacluster), to migrating to RedPanda.<p>RedPanda was a huge win for us. Confluent never made sense to us since we were always so cost conscious but the complexity/risk of managing a critical part of our infra was always something I worried about. RedPanda was able to handle both for us - cheaper than Kafka hosting vendors with significantly better performance. We were pretty early customers but was a huge win for us.
Same, small martech company. RedPanda works and the pricing allows actually using the service, plus the “source available” isn’t that limiting if you prefer to run your own stuff. Definitely glad to be off kafka prior to this news!
This. Using RP was like a breath of fresh air compared to the dread of Kafka (both local dev, and running a prod cluster)
We switched to Redpanda's BYOC product because we couldn't use Confluent Cloud (contractual reasons) and BYOC was a third the price of Confluent for Kubernetes while also being a managed service.<p>I've been pretty happy with RP performance/cost/functionality wise. It isn't Kafka though, it's a proprietary C++ rewrite that aims for 100% compatibility. This hasn't been an issue in the 2+ years since we migrated prod, but YMMV.
Maybe this whole thing it's because Snowflake acquired redpanda earlier this year: <a href="https://www.investors.com/news/technology/snowflake-stock-redpanda-acquisition-impact-confluent/" rel="nofollow">https://www.investors.com/news/technology/snowflake-stock-re...</a>
I worked for IBM Cloud about 6+ years ago. While there, we had to connect to a Softlayer VPN to get into our Jira instance. My VPN account and Jira account never got provisioned so I couldn't connect nor see the Jira board. My team-mates couldn't even assign a ticket to me b/c of this. They would just put my initial's in the ticket summary and send me a slack of the details.<p>It was right before I left that we got our own Jira instance. This was all around the time of the Red Hat acquisition. I remember the announcement b/c we used SuSE for everything IIRC.
It's like how lots of species evolve into crabs, or crab like things. Instead of dying out evolutionarily, failed giants like IBM evolve into Computer Associates.
Kafka is already past it's prime time. Time for new solutions for the oldest problem - sending a message.
I'm still convinced the vast majority of kafka implementations could be replaced with `SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER BY timestamp ASC`
pull vs push. Plus if you start storing the last timestamp so you only select the delta and if you start sharding your db and dealing with complexities of having different time on different tables/replication issues it quickly becomes evident that Kafka is better in this regard.<p>But yeah, for a lot of implementations you don't need streaming. But for pull based apps you design your architecture differently, some things are a lot easier than it is with DB, some things are harder.
Yes but try putting that on your CV.
Sure, if you're working on a small homelab with minimal to no processing volume.<p>The second you approach any kind of scale, this falls apart and/or you end up with a more expensive and worse version of Kafka.
I think there is a wide spectrum between small-homelab and google scale.<p>I was surprised how far sqlite goes with some sharding on modern SSDs for those in-between scale services/saas
What you're doing is fine for a homelab, or learning. But barring any very specific reason other than just not liking Kafka, its bad. The second that pattern needs to be fanned out to support even 50+ producers/consumers, the overhead and complexity needed to manage already-solved problems becomes a very bad design choice.<p>Kafka already solves this problem and gives me message durability, near infinite scale out, sharding, delivery guarantees, etc out of the box. I do not care to develop, reshard databases or production-alize this myself.
Some people don't and won't need 50+ producers/consumers for a long while, if ever. Rewriting the code at that point may be less costly than operating Kafka in the interim. Kafka is also has a higher potential for failure than sqlite.
Ofc, and not everybody needs or cares for all the features Kafka has. Then use another known and tested messaging system. Use NATS or ZMQ. Or any cloud native pubsub system<p>My main point is, I have zero interest in creating novel solutions to a solved problem. It just artificially increases the complexity of my work and the learning curve for contributors.
Okay, then those people don’t have to use Kafka. What is your point?
sqlite can do 40,000 transactions per second, that's going to be a lot more than 'homelab' (home lab).<p>Not everything needs to be big and complicated.
"Any kind of scale" No, there's a long way of better and more straightforward solutions than the simple SELECT<p>(SELECT * from EVENTS where TIMESTAMP > LAST_TS LIMIT 50) for example
That is exactly what I am doing with sqlite.<p>Have a table level seqno as monotonically increasing number stamped for every mutation. When a subscriber connects it asks for rows > Subscriber's seqno-last-handled.
Nothing wrong with Kafka. Time to build better abstractions on top of Kafka.
Erlang/OTP!
ATProto? (aka AT protocol, ATP, Atmosphere...)
What are the alternatives?
RedPanda, Iggy, Pulsar, Fluvio, NATS, etc.
wait what do you mean? what's wrong with kafka?
This is great news. Kafka (the messaging/streaming platform) has finally found its natural home.
ibm also acquired datastax (managed pulsar) this year. building on top of these specialized managed service providers is becoming increasingly risky. at this point i'd rather use one of the kneecapped cloud provider offerings if possible (azure event hubs / aws msk / etc.) than risk being extorted in a few years as the result of some acquisition. at least you can work around the limitations..<p>anyone have an idea on how streamnative is doing? we're considering them for managed pulsar and unfortunately nobody else is in the game
IBM is buying market share, not a surprise; at least one telecom has all their Kafka stuff on the Confluent cloud, and there must be 1000s of such customers.
At least you can now safely buy into Kafka, as nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
This isn't the old times, you can expect the opposite outcome these days.
I know companies who would certainly have fired people for buying IBM, if they could have gone back in time to do so.
IBM was teabagging the Hasicorp booth at re:Invent with conspicuously old hardware set out like a museum piece. Ugh.
Do you mean sandbagging?
What does this mean?
I read it as purposely making the booth unattractive or bland? not sure either haha
That's good, that's good!<p>A nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat!<p>Nudge, nudge, know what I mean?
Adjacent space, but can't help but wonder why Confluent did so much better than MapR
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20053188">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20053188</a> and <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252468013/MapR-collapse-into-HPE-harbinger-of-big-data-tech-trough-of-despair" rel="nofollow">https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252468013/MapR-collapse-...</a> have some context on MapR's demise.<p>IMO they were simultaneously worse situated for near-real-time stream processing and for S3-esque cloud storage, areas Kafka and Confluent excelled.
If Apache Foundation is where open source projects go to die (a bit unfair though), IBM is the equivalent for for-profit companies.
How is this different from Apache Qpid or RabbitMQ or IBM MQ (at least the first and third of those is already owned by IBM!)
If you're serious, Kafka is a topic-centric message bus. Everything is a topic, not a queue, and its internals are optimized to achieve very quick at-least-once delivery.
Let the Bluewashing begin. Everything will be WebSphere-first and then WebSphere-only.
previously...<p><a href="https://www.confluent.io/blog/confluent-acquires-warpstream/" rel="nofollow">https://www.confluent.io/blog/confluent-acquires-warpstream/</a>
good for the founding team! Kafka is an enterprise bloat. most of the queueing solutions could be built with something much simpler
is it good or bad for confluent employees?
IBM paid a ~30% premium on the current stock price, so all shareholders (I imagine employees own a bunch of shares) will get a decent chunk of cash.<p>Some redundant departments (HR, finance, accounting and the like) will be downsized after the acquisition.<p>Engineering and product will be unaffected in the short term, but in a year or two the IBM culture will start to seep in, and that would be a good time for tenured employees to start planning their exits. That's also when lock-up agreements will expire and the existing leadership of Confluent will depart and be replaced by IBM execs.
It depends a lot on which org they go into, and the motivations of the P&L owner of that division.<p>IBM is a really big and diverse company, in a way fundamentally different from most other big tech. In a sense, it is completely incoherent to refer to them as a singular entity.<p>My opinions are my own. I worked at IBM like a decade ago in a role where I could see the radically different motivations of divisions.
From experience, and to slightly refute the sibling replied, good for the confluent peeps that get flagged as being essential to the acquisition, they'll get a retention bonus of 100-300% of base pay spread over three years. The cutting of staff will begin likely in the 3-5 year time frame.
IPO'd at 45, high of 90ish, sold at 30. It depends on the strike price for employees, but its not clear if its universally a good outcome.
Both.<p>IBM will likely give Confluent employees a large pay package, and then let them go after the merger.
They will get some money in the short term, but they better start looking for another job<p>edit: btw, it's typical for any acquisition/merger
the price sounds a little bit high from a technical perspective
Some market reaction<p><i>Confluent stock soars 29% as IBM announces $11B acquisition deal</i><p><a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/08/ibm-confluent-deal-data.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/08/ibm-confluent-deal-data.html</a>
This is so funny. Now CNBC says "...The addition of Confluence will strengthen IBM’s artificial intelligence portfolio..."<p>Since when is streaming event logs AI? Am I taking crazy pills?
Near-Real-time inference is a hot thing these days with Apache Flink, which is commercially supported by Confluent (not Confluence)
Haven’t got the memo? Everything computing is AI now. If you want to sell it, that is.
And the enshittification treadmill continues. Great time to be a kafka alternative.<p>I'll start.<p><a href="https://github.com/tansu-io/tansu" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tansu-io/tansu</a>
Redpanda has been a superior wire-compatible alternative to Kafka for years.<p><a href="https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka" rel="nofollow">https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka</a>
<a href="https://nats.io" rel="nofollow">https://nats.io</a><p>Not a drop in replacement, but worth looking at.
<a href="https://pulsar.apache.org/" rel="nofollow">https://pulsar.apache.org/</a>
Apache Iggy seems like a project with a lot of momentum: <a href="https://github.com/apache/iggy" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/apache/iggy</a>
Do any of these alternatives make it easy to transition a system that is using Kafka Connectors and Avro?
`SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER BY timestamp ASC`
wait what's wrong with kafka?
I was in the midst of writing a snarky reply and then realized my <i>actual</i> issue with Kafka is that people reach for it way too often and use it in ways that don't really make sense.<p>Kind of like how people use docker for evrything, when what you really should be doing is learn how to package software.
Ops here, Docker is packaging software.<p>Agree on the Kafka thing though. I've seen so many devs trip over Kafka topics, partitions and offsets when their throughput is low enough that RabbitMQ would do fine.
No, docker is a software for packaging systems.<p>The people distributing software should shut them damn up about how the rest of the system it runs in is configured. (But not you, your job is packaging full systems.)<p>That said, it seems to me that this is becoming less of a problem.
Nothing inherently wrong with the core product IMHO. The issue is more with Confluent, who have been constantly swinging from hot buzzword to hot buzzword for the last few years in search of growth. Confluent cloud is very expensive, and you still have to deal with a surprising amount of scaling headaches. I have people I consider friends that work there, so I don't want to go too deep into their various missteps, but the Kafka ecosystem has been largely stagnant outside of getting rid of Zookeeper and simplifying operations/deployment. There have been some decent quality of life fixes, but the platform is very expensive, yet if you are really all-in on Kafka, you would be insane to not get support from Confluent- it can break in surprising ways.<p>So you are stuck with some really terrible tradeoffs- Go with Confluent Cloud, pay a fortune, and still likely have some issues to deal with. Or you could go with Confluent Platform, still have to pay people to operate it, while Confluent the company focuses most of their attention on Cloud and still charges you a fortune. Or you could just go completely OS and forgo anything Confluent and risk being really up the river when something inevitably breaks, or you have to learn the hard way that librdkafka has poor support for a lot of the shiny features discussed in the release notes.<p>Redpanda has surpassed them from a technical quality perspective, but Kafka has them beat on the ecosystem and the sheer inertia of moving from one platform to another. Kafka for example was built in a time of spinning rust hard disks, and expects to be run on general purpose compute nodes, where Redpanda will actually look at your hardware and optimize the number of threads its spawns for the box it is on- assuming it is going to be the only real app running there, which is true for anything but a toy deployment.<p>This is my experience from running platform teams and being head of messaging at multiple companies.
What's wrong with kafka or what WILL BE wrong with kafka?
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification</a> is helpful if you arent aware of how late stage capitalism works
Another genius move from International Business Machines!
How is IBM still alive? Or is it trying to prove the same
Could anyone please explain what IBM is even doing these days? Where revenue is coming from?