I'd rather say IBM got cannibalized by "financial engineers", this wasn't a decision made because of "it's a commodity".

There used to be a time when IBM actually meant quality (that's where "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" came from, after all), but nowadays? A loooot of stuff is either sold (Thinkpad went to Lenovo, Lotus Notes to HCL), faded into irrelevancy outside of extremely few niche markets (anything mainframe), got left for dead (the PC - it used to be called "IBM compatible personal computer"!) or got spun off (Kyndryl).

According to Wikipedia, IBM has 282.000 employees worldwide. What the fuck are all of these people doing?

The no one ever got fired for buying IBM wasn’t about quality. It’s always safe to buy the default choice that everyone else uses. Especially when things go wrong.

Many want to be founders here on HN don’t get that. Even if your product is better and cheaper, there is too much of a reputational risk signing a contract for a B2B SaaS product with an unknown vendor.

On a completely unrelated note, for the love of all that is holy don’t try to do B2B SaaS without SSO support.

Making a lot of money for the company.