Comment by npalli
7 days ago
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 brutal 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.
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.
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.
Are they dying? IBM’s stock is up 160% over the past 5 years.
No. They are a multi-generational institution at this point and they are constantly evolving. If you work there it definitely FEELS like they are dying because the thing you spent the last 10 years of your career on is going away and was once heralded as the "next big thing." That said, IBM fascinated me when I was acquired by them because it is like a living organism. Hard to kill, fully enmeshed in both the business and political fabric of things and so ultimately able to sustain market shifts.
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I interned there one summer and I felt like 9 years ago when I was there the company died 30 years prior. It’s a super weird place to work
I don't think they're dying at all, they're just become yet another consultancy/outsourcing shop
turning into a rent-seeking-behavior engine.
the final end-state of the company, like a glorious star turning into a black hole
exactly
[dead]
IBM is a consulting business, not a software business. Their software sucks, and every actual software engineer knows it. IBM has a business selling to big, old, backwards enterprise businesses who wouldn't know good software from literal pieces of faeces.
That's not entirely true. Db2, for example, is a well-respected database.
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!
Are they really a software business?
Investopedia says[0] they make 60% of their profit from "Software" but how much of that is "providing cloud solutions" and similar software-adjacent consulting exercises?
[0]: https://www.investopedia.com/how-ibm-makes-money-4798528
Not a Hacker News take I would have expected 10 years ago. Today, though. I agree.