[mgilroy]

I think the more interesting question is how much longer does oracle have and at what point does a hostile takeover make sense.

Their databases are heavily used in government, banking and other large industries which have been slower to adapt to change and strugglyto migrate away. At what point does purchasing oracle to gain customer share, existing data centres and the opportunity to migrate to your cloud platform make more sense than competing?

They still have a high market value. However, the debt they will need to service will result in ongoing price increases which will encourage people to migrate away. Over time they will struggle to service the debt and a buyout will be the best of the bad options.

[cogman10]

I mean, it's still pretty unclear to me how IBM continues to operate. They run like Oracle but with 20 year old tech.

[topspin]

Last I looked (about a year ago,) IBM is 3 things: Software licensing, services and Big Iron. The companies' revenue is split roughly equally among these three areas.

An interesting perspective of IBM is its relative position. It's leveled off at about $60b/y, after a lengthy decline. It is far overmatched by many big tech companies today in terms of revenue.

It's a niche business, serving niche demands. I think IBM's moat is that most of its business is highly uninteresting: industrialized box ticking work, deeply entangled by contracts and a strong need for continuity by its customers.

I actually had a recent encounter with one of IBM's products. A commercial B2B REST API I created was analyzed by an IBM vulnerability scanning platform on behalf of a major US municipality. It didn't find anything actually critical, but there were some worthwhile points in the report, and working around a false positive was a frustration. The product, in this case, is diffusion of responsibility.

On the Big Iron end, IBM isn't really selling hardware. They selling an ecosystem: services, software, support, continuity (over decades,) etc. It pleases me that they chose to stick to Power: it's nice to know Itanium didn't kill off every enterprise RISC platform.

Maybe, one day, some major quantum computing breakthrough happens at IBM. As far as I can see, that's the only play they have that could change their trajectory. In the meantime, they have a large software portfolio and plenty of institutions that will keep signing contracts long after I'm gone.

[esseph]

They're one ~ 3 main companies in the US that will sell you quantum computers, and the only one offering a quantum PaaS.

They do a lot of stuff. Also own Hashicorp now, so they have things like: Ansible / RedHat Linux (already owned), Terraform, Consul, Nomad, Packer, etc. A lot of "let's build modern infra" tooling.

[smj-edison]

iirc they still do a lot of chip research and fabrication equipment. They were able to keep that side of the business going at least.

[evilduck]

Mainframes aren't going anywhere.

[blinding-streak]

Well they're really heavy.

[stogot]

They are, but slowly

[ProAm]

> how much longer does oracle have and at what point does a hostile takeover make sense

Oracle is heavily tied to the government and as a result is a 'too big to fail' company. They will never be taken over or go bankrupt.