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IBM still makes boatloads of money providing support and upgrade paths to it's legacy customers. They aren't _actively_ offboarding because it wouldn't make sen

IBM still makes boatloads of money providing support and upgrade paths to it's legacy customers. They aren't _actively_ offboarding because it wouldn't make sense to lose that institutional market that they effectively own by the balls and that nobody will fight them for. It'd be hard to sell that tech to new customers though and it would also invite comparison to modern solutions, which would not please their current customers. It's like IBM is running a island prison / amusement park for rich old people. Just keep them happy and they'll keep paying.

bluepizza 4y ago
My anecdata involves a foreign market. Maybe IBM USA is more keen on keeping this rolling, but in Japan we got strong pushback and were led to cloud solutions every time we discussed acquiring new hardware. They were very proactively trying to get us out of AS/400 and into their cloud platform.
- speed_spread 4y ago
  Interesting, maybe they feel that they have a strong enough grip on their customers that they can move them away from proprietary hardware to higher-margins proprietary cloud solutions.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    Or maybe someone's KPIs are aligned towards cloud growth.
    - bluepizza 4y ago
      That's true and it really is a major factor in dying technologies: where there is no growth, there is no investment.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]