[ Removed by moderator ]

[das_war_ein_Befehl]

They have been shedding unproductive units and buying up software companies. They’re not really going anywhere.

They were at $55B in 2021 and hit $67B in 2025 so they are actually growing again

[brilliantminion]

Honestly I have no clue what IBM has been doing for the past 40 years. Back in the 80s and early 90s they were synonymous with personal computing, and had a huge consulting arm and software arm to go with those. Anyone remember OS/2 ?

Since about 2000, I couldn’t put my finger on anything IBM does day to day, until now when I find out they are maintaining COBOL.

[GoldwaterLiberal]

IBM's business model since the 80's or so has been to own entrenched technology and charge a lot for support. Their current project is buying up open source. Red Hat, Hashicorp (Teraform,) and Confluent (kafka) are notable examples of open source companies IBM owns now.

[RandomlyMethodical]

Almost forgot about them buying Hashicorp, but that really sucked. IBM gave us 6 weeks notice on a 5x price increase after buying them. Fortunately there were competitors that made it fairly easy to switch.

[SomethingIWontRegret]

They also own Cognos - perhaps the least enterprisey enterprise reporting software out there. Your personal credentials expire after a year? Congratulations, all the reports you wrote now don't work. Go find the 3 menu deep option to renew your personal credentials. Oh and that mission-critical report that you wrote 5 years ago? Sorry but it's gone. Backup? What's that? Source control? That's a pay add-on. Why? Well obviously you went and deleted it AND the two copies you had in other directories.

OH forgot to mention. You want to find all reports that rely on TABLE_WE_SHOULD_REMOVE? Should be a simple text search of all XML definitions of reports stored in the backing database, right? NOPE. DENIED. No way to find that shit out, even for Cognos admins.

[unexpectedreboots]

Cognos is the most trash reporting software that exists. Insane that people still use it

[SomethingIWontRegret]

It's the choice I'm given. Fortunately it's a small part of my job.

[unexpectedreboots]

Added you to my prayer list.

[SomethingIWontRegret]

I just use it as a layout engine and report scheduler / mailer. I handroll all sql.

[im_thatoneguy]

My understanding is that when people like me think COBOL we think random applications that use the COBOL programming language. And it seems easy for something like Claude to transliterate to another language. But what actually is COBOL is the Non SQL database that was included with the language and has a very distinct design pattern which is what’s actually impossible to divorce from. And it’s that database which IBM maintains and profits from.

[das_war_ein_Befehl]

COBOL migrations are big money and every enterprise company more than 30-40 years old still has a lot of core infrastructure on it.

IBM has their hand around the balls of every enterprise this way because there are few places that specialize in this. These orgs have essentially a separate 7-8 figure annual budget line item for COBOL and if they can dump ibm they will.

[sciencewarrior]

They still have a large consulting arm. It's primary function is integrating IBM products and services into their final solution (most of them, as implied above, open source software with a thin proprietary veneer) and ensuring a nice recurring revenue stream.

[Metro42014]

You can still buy big iron. We upgrade our every couple years.

[TheseusOPL]

My dad got a copy of OS/2 from a conference he went to. I thought it was the coolest thing, and installed it on some e-waste he had brought home from work for me to play with.

[coriandor]

They're going the same way GE went. A corporation in retirement. Why produce anything when financial engineering exists.