Someone must have thought about this. PMs, Directors, lots of people involved in putting this together.

I wonder what their target customer is. They must have analyzed and projected this. I'm genuinely interested.

steve-atx-7600 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There is so much business software out there and ecosystems that have evolved around it. Systems still running cobol on IBM mainframes; or, more "modern" stacks like Java apps running in IBM websphere. There are relatively small numbers of HN reading folk that went to some of the best CS programs and/or work(ed) at FANG caliber companies (whatever you call them now). The rest of the software engineer types are a diverse crowd and turning to IBM Bob might be more natural than some creepy looking orange starfish offering. That's my hypothesis anyway.

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throwitaway222 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And the solution to those businesses is not more IBM software, but Claude Code converting it to Go/Rust/Typescript in a few weeks.

	▲	steve-atx-7600 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I have a feeling that if they already thought like that, they wouldn’t be using IBM legacy stacks in 2026.

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kitd 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A lot of IBM customers have moved to RH Openshift and running their java there.

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kfarr 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm sure tons of companies have retainer spends with IBM for software, hardware, consulting, etc., and this is another way for their corporate clients to spend down / increase their retainers faster