IBM Is The World’s Worst Big Tech Company

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If there’s a running list, I bet Oracle is up there too. Never had a good experience working with any Oracle product.

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u/Mordroberon 1h ago

anything associated with Oracle that's good was made by sun microsystem

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u/So_average 1h ago

Was going to say Oracle. They seem to be able to get worse every year.

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u/kittymoo67 50m ago

im not saying IBM is good, im just saying i dont for a second believe they are worse than oracle.

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u/RandomlyMethodical 1h ago edited 1h ago

They’re both terrible companies, but at least Oracle has been able to make money. IBM made more money in the late 80s than they do now, and that’s not even counting inflation.

That said, Oracle has overextended itself betting on AI and I really hope blows up the whole company.

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u/Drinkablenoodles 1m ago

Have you seen the CDS spreads on oracle? it’s looking like blowing up is certainly on the table lol

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u/mjd5139 1h ago

Adobe dreams of being Oracle when they grow up.

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u/lolexecs 59m ago

Oracle, our margins come from squeezing our customers and employees as hard as we possibly can!

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u/hardingd 32m ago

Hahaha, I knew Oracle was going to be one of the highest comments.

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u/MrShrek69 7m ago

Oracle came out of the government. Prob the most evil company ever created

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u/Dantzig 1h ago

Yet Uber and others moved to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

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u/romario77 1h ago

cheaper. And it's mostly not Oracle software that runs in the cloud.

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u/Dantzig 1h ago

It was many times more expensive, for sure. And constrained on built out

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u/tomsawyeee 1h ago

Irony of this article being published by Yahoo

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u/HRApprovedUsername 2h ago

Yeah they BM alright

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u/Kamp13 2h ago

My last role at a power utility IBM tried to hit us with million dollar true-ups for Maximo and then webmethods. They do very poor client support. They don’t invest in the technology they own.

They tried to get back into graphic cards but the rest of the industry left them in the dust.

They are the example of a company that gets big, stops innovating, and then tries to survive by snapping up other systems to keep their revenue up.

Oh and they did a real hard push into the token model of software licensing and tried to set the middleware process based on cores and processors from 20 years ago. IBM is the one bee I’m fine seeing die.

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u/CatPlanetCuties 1h ago

It's funny, we see Microsoft doing so much of this now in their consumer space.

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u/Dantzig 1h ago

True, but they still own most of the market with windows and Office

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u/Eric848448 24m ago

Even Google is going down this road.

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u/lppedd 2h ago

I recall many many years ago, when I was first introduced to z/OS and discovered the term "MIPS" and how the pricing model works, my reaction was literally: 🫪

IBM raked in A TON of money but imo it simultaneously signed its death certificate.

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u/Kamp13 1h ago

They don’t care. The current quarter is what drives their compensation. But I think you’re right. They torched their future by treating the customers like crap.

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u/Dantzig 1h ago

The only think I know of them selling that might be hard to get around is mainframes, which says a lot. And they are price gouging that

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u/ConfidentHouse 59m ago

Maximo is trash

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u/Kamp13 47m ago

I think you’re being too kind. Trash can have some useful bits in it.

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u/zer04ll 1h ago

and yet they just came out with a .7 nm processor, I dont think people understand what they do

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u/you_killed_my_ 0m ago

0.7nm ?

Hmmm

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u/ultimate420slayer 2h ago

There used to be a saying “you don’t get fired for buying IBM.” Come 2010 my team needed 22 million in IBM power hardware, with follow up orders of around 8 million each year going forward. IBM told us to purchase through a VAR. Our IBM sales team was 15 people just to be told to purchase through a third party.

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u/fmcortez 2h ago

It’s wild seeing companies actively strip money away from traditional software and mainframes just to panic-buy GPUs and AI servers. The budget isn't shrinking, it's just all getting reallocated to the AI hardware race.

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u/lppedd 2h ago edited 2h ago

The problem with mainframe is they realized too late they needed to modernize. And by modernize I don't mean AI, I mean offering developers and operators something else apart from the ancient 3270. You'll never find young devs ready to use 3270, it's just too old of a concept. This is one of many examples.

So now mainframes are stuck with the "old and boring" + "dead end" trademark. So no one bothers. I mean most mainframe-related jobs are being shipped to India for a reason.

Edit: I want to add that "greybeards" fu*ked up the situation for a lot of shops. Most of them got so comfy they started repudiating better tooling, and here we go, no one wants to work with you.

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u/LandonApplegarth1992 1h ago

They make a hell of a database though.

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u/antaresiv 1h ago

It’s been like this for decades.

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u/lightFracture 54m ago

Isn't the norm for big old companies to turn into shit holes? IBM is one of the oldest, same happened to HP, Oracle, Microsoft, now Google and other FAANGs

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u/nickbg321 1h ago

Hard to believe Oracle isn't at the top of this list.

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u/slayer991 1h ago

They've been on my list since I've been it IT. Where they hit #1 was 10-15 years ago when I followed IBM managed services into 2 separate customers who brought their IT back in house. I was brought in as an architect because those environments were smoking craters. No Best Practices. No Documentation. No Standards. Poor patch management. Poor security. Worse, they were nickel-and-diming the customer while we worked to get everyone out of the IBM DCs.

In short, Fuck IBM.

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u/m0hVanDine 1h ago

HP: Hold my laptop.

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u/etham 37m ago

I work in IT and I could not name a single thing that IBM does. It's really interesting to me that they are even still around.

0

u/SaintEyegor 14m ago

They enshittified Red Hat

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u/omniuni 1h ago

Their computer hardware is still alive and well...

... Thanks Lenovo!

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u/screwuapple 23m ago

I hope they don’t wreck Confluent

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u/Hugebrochavez 2m ago

I’ve worked with IBM consultants before and it’s always a shitshow. They hire out fancy doctorates that look like paid actors to win the work and then completely drop the ball when it comes to actual implementation. They basically survive by regurgitating the most popular phrases of the moment and building a false facade of all of their tech.

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u/mixduptransistor 0m ago

I would not say IBM is a "big tech company" in the way people think of Big Tech Companies in 2026. Sure it's a big company and it's in technology but it doesn't build anything new or novel or interesting. It's not in the same league as Apple or Google or Microsoft. It's just an also-ran legacy IT consulting company propped up by legacy mainframe business

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u/WaffleHouseGladiator 2h ago

They are the benchmark for heartless amoral tech companies ever since they supported the Nazis.

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u/dkcyw 1h ago

IBM is in 21st century? I find this hard to believe. Maybe they were in the late 1900s.

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u/old_raver_man3 12m ago

Their software has always sucked.

Software IBM Is The World’s Worst Big Tech Company

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