This type of comment appears here every time the name IBM shows up, but it is more symptomatic, of the bubble a part of HN lives on.
Think every core IT infra of most of the developed world countries, most of the ebanking and core messaging infra of your large banks and insurance companies, plus billions per year in consulting services revenue.
Indeed, there's also a whole world of B2B software which you may be almost entirely unaware of if you've spent your whole career in consumer-facing web/app development.
It is more than IBM used to be a big name in areas where hackers would be expected to be. They have left all those behind though. there are lots of other companies that none of us would recognize that are big, but IBM is a name that we all know as once somewhat important who now are not.
Right. If you are in the HN bubble, then 30 years ago IBM was a big name in computing as the inventor of the PC, OS/2, maker of a great keyboard, and a bunch of weird systems we never touched. They sold their PC and keyboard businesses, and let OS/2 die. We think some of those weird systems still exist, but those never were very relevant unless you had to work on them.
HN users are trendy. If you didn't grow up in the 1990s or before though you may not remember just how picked on this type of crowd was. Now while we are never exactly the "in" crowd, we are respected, being a "nerd" or "geek" is now an acceptable thing. We have come a long way and that is enough trendy enough for us.
Ugh, and have you actually looked at IBM’e share price? Or is it this because IBM isn’t cool to you? A bit rich for a community that’ll go work for shares in some dinky web app startup.
As far as I can tell, the vast majority of the universe is completely incompetent with IT, but needs a lot of boring things done.
If you're a shipyard, an oil company, a bank, an automaker, etc. you still need software to manage things like inventory, employees, logistics, and similar, and you have zero expertise to do it in-house. They also have zero expertise to find a qualified vendor.
IBM is essentially a large bank with a side business of tech. IBM is known for financially complex deals that are highly lucrative. They make their money by taking advantage of inefficiencies in the largest enterprises purchasing and technology teams.
