Why IBM got a reputation of destroying everything they touch?

vis4valentine@lemmy.ml to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 194 points –

After the Red Hat mess I see many people saying IBM destroys everything they touch, but I can't think of many examples of it. Can you tell me what else IBM has destroyed after acquiring it, or something good that they themselves developed and then ruined it with stupid corporate choices?

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IBM is a law firm wrapped in a tech company.

Source - 10+ years working with them and watching them keep their claws dug in with management.

This right here. When the company I worked for got bought by them our code got "blue washed" by a team of....lawyer/dev hybrids for lack of a better term. They ripped the shit out of our code. It took us years to unshitify it.

What does blue washed mean?

Bluewashed was a IBM term. Since IBMs main color is blue it went with everything. Bluetape, bluewash, blueshit, etc. Bluewashing to them was taking a program/app and doing a series of things to fuck it up.

  1. Strip out any code that might get them sued.
  2. Strip out any "bad" or "funny" comments in the code.
  3. If easily possible replace things like Apache for IBM HTTP server. Wildfly/Tomcat for IBM Websphere.
  4. Product must have an installer even if you have a product that the customer doesn't install. There's probably more that I blocked out but thats the tl;dr of it.

Oh speaking of Blueshit. If you wanted to order something like say a laptop dock for your new laptop. Try to order it through their "buy on demand" system.

Me: Ok its for my laptop so I can get work done.

Them: (Some asshat in Denmark) Denied, workstations are not allowed docking stations, mice, additional monitors etc.

Me: "hold my beer" Resubmit request: Lab equipment for the REDACTED lab, to support multiple monitors in the test environment.

Them: (Someone in France) Approved! You should see your equipment in 2-3 weeks.

Me: WTF??

Gotcha, so it's IBM's own brand of enshittification lol

Yes but think of it as a company with mostly infinite resources to infinity shitify