After the Red Hat mess I see many people saying IBM destroys everything they touch, but I can’t think of many examples of it. Can you tell me what else IBM has destroyed after acquiring it, or something good that they themselves developed and then ruined it with stupid corporate choices?
I don’t think it’s only IBM, I think IBM’s business gets more visibility than others.
The issue is most likely related to critical size corporate. Beyond a certain size, growing further is difficult in your “core” business, so to expand, you need to add new activities. To avoid starting from scratch, the corporate will acquire another company.
That’s where things get sketchy: what made that acquired company successful? It can be the product alone, in which case the product will just change its brand and business may continue as usual, but it may also largely be due to the smaller company having a better culture: promoting innovation, human-first drive, etc. All these things are easier to achieve with a smaller company, and very difficult to keep when you scale up and suddenly the CEO makes decisions for thousands of people whom existence he ignores, as compared to smaller company where the CEO has been to all offices (or almost) and met everyone at least once.
When the corporate absorbs the smaller one, they unify all procedures and treatments, and suddenly all the ingredients that made their acquired company successful are gone! From there, the fate is sealed: the activity will go down, slowly or less slowly.