Ben Thompson, writing at Stratchery:
This is the bet: while in the 1990s the complexity of the Internet made it difficult for businesses to go online, providing an opening for IBM to sell solutions, today IBM argues the reduction of cloud computing to three centralized providers makes businesses reluctant to commit to any one of them. IBM is betting it can again provide the solution, combining with Red Hat to build products that will seamlessly bridge private data centers and all of the public clouds.
IBM believes their play to staying relevant in the “cloud” era, if you’ll call it that, is to acquire RedHat. Good luck to them. The tweets about the acquisition are fantastic:
"Bureaucratic, old-school legacy software vendor which survives on services revenues in massive acquisition shock as it is purchased by IBM" – @lproven
— David Gerard (@davidgerard) October 29, 2018
Dear Red Hat staff, congrats on your new home in IBM. This IBM memo may be useful.
"Do not interact with [CEO] Ginni or the group unless they approach you first. This means no selfies, no bathroom run-ins, elevator pitches, or water fountain soirees…"https://t.co/40bBw3rSSt
— The Register (@TheRegister) October 28, 2018