How many companies did IBM buy and destroy through management incompetence? They make billion dollar bonehead decisions and we keep earning the company more so they can do it again. I will start with an odd one. Rolm, A telephone equipment manufacturer....gone. Redhat?
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It is the blueprint you describe of destroying complete ecosystems around the acquisitions: this is called the dry milking. Marketshare, product quality, customer satisfaction all go down but the queues at support go up as well as the software pricing. I believe that a software lifecycle is around 7 years, between yr 5 and yr 7 the customer decides to continue or to move to a competitor. You know the answer: customers run in droves. The main cause is the endless greed in IBM, they want the latest penny out of the starving cow. In the meantime careers are ruined, families in trouble and customers gone. I sincerely hope this will not be the case with Red Hat but history have proven the opposite...
IBM's second biggest acquisition was BI company Cognos for $5 billion in 2008 The implosion of Cognos is the same as similar acquisitions like SPSS and Algorithmics: First year of bluewashing goes OK. IBM goes out their way to attribute as much income as possible to the new inductees. Within 2 years, sales attributions dry up because other thiefdoms insist on a bigger cut of the shrinking revenue pie. Within 5 years, the braintrust has quit in frustration and the business goes on life support. The final stake in the heart: Armonk inserts a VP from an unrelated IBM division who can't manage anything other than instilling fear in the few people who are left.
The person running Cognos a decade later has shrunk the business in half and never produced a competitive product. His employee rating numbers are lower than Donald Trump's. Yet Armonk can't say enough good things about this kind of leader.
Sound familiar?