It sucks but I see why they do it. If you don't have the technical/managerial talent to handle procurement then it's the safest bet.
To say nothing of the banks and others still using the IBM big iron.
I didn't even use the word "modern."
I actually agree the traditional cloud providers have lots of issues and aren't always the right choice, but the fact remains that offerings from Red Hat and the like are far more popular with older larger corporations than startups or "household name" tech companies like X, Netflix, etc.
> This stuff is popular in government or old businesses that may have been slow to (or unable to for regulatory reasons) jump to AWS/GCP etc.
I think it's fair to say that you think migrating to the hyperscalars is a thing a company should do. That's what my previous post was addressing
Personally I think at their scale, self hosting and creating more interoperability between the stacks would have been a better investment but I was not CTO or an SVP so I didn't get to make those decisions.
Their purchse of RedHat flows into consulting. Their purchase of Softlayer (rebranded into IBM Cloud) is more IBM owned, customer operated computing, a business IBM has been in since forever.