BMC's $1.6B victory over IBM is TKO on appeal

IBM has managed to overturn a $1.6 billion judgment against it after an appeals court decided the IT giant was well within its rights to replace software on a customer mainframe belonging to rival BMC with its own code. The ruling [PDF], handed down yesterday by a three-judge panel at the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals, …

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Resource Actioned

IBMers and other employees subjected to sharp practices would probably not recognise an IBM with a sense of justice and propriety

"offends the sense of justice and propriety that the public expects from American businesses."

[Someone Else]

Re: Resource Actioned

"offends the sense of justice and propriety that the public expects from American businesses."

I can't believe that anyone who lives and works in America, and (more importantly) is employed by an American business, could possibly believe there is such a thing as a "sense of justice and propriety" in any such American business. Much less IBM.

_{Well, since that judge is not employed by an American business, I can see the source of her confusion...}

[Brian 3]

Re: Resource Actioned

That's Texas for you. They really like to talk themselves up as heroes while they rob you and shoot your horse.

[Terry 6]

Contracts

Big business contracts, with big law firms writing/reading every dot and comma, are essentially a battleground - it appears. And any company that misses a comma or finds one is going to get the outcomes accordingly- given a fair wind.

[Bebu]

All in the Family

I was wondering where BMC was from (thinking EU/DE) and that par for the course another non-US entity had been shafted by the best legal system that money can buy.

But it appears that, like incest, it's all in the family - IBM, BMC and AT&T are all US corporations happily screwing each other in the US courts.

The US judicial system appears to be a version of the board game Monopoly™ where instead of houses etc you accumulate judges and presumably a hotel corresponds to securing a SC appointee

The only people that go to gaol the those who haven't collected enough cash or have sufficiently pissed off those that own the hotels.

[Somone Unimportant]

BMC still around?

Hmmm - I thought that they went out of business in the 1970's after some particularly poor vehicle design choices.

The P76 was a real stinker...

(I wonder - is there a statute of limitations on reuse of an Initialism?)

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: BMC still around?

I think the BOFH would disagree with you about the P76...

[Dunstan Vavasour]

Re: BMC still around?

Indeed, I thought they'd rebranded at least a decade ago to "BMC-oh-are-they-still-going?"

[Brian Scott]

Re: BMC still around?

My BMC bike is really nice. It would even be really fast if I was a lot fitter. Cadel Evans won the tour de france on a BMC riding for the BMC team.

I don't drive my old BMC Wolsely (15/60) anywhere near enough.

Oh, and I do have an old BMC software cap somewhere around here.

So yes, the initials are well and truly over-used.

BTW: The P76 was quite a good car in it's time. I really liked the V8, but most of them have wound up in speed boats. I could also sell you about a dozen P76s if you like but none of them are running any more.

[xyz123]

Who the hell still uses IBM?

IBM in emails openly referred to its OWN employees as "useless N-words" and fired them as soon as upper management found they weren't white. THOUSANDS of cases.

They fire anyone they find out is gay or bi. And there's internal emails referring to them by some horrible slurs.

They've fired pregnant employees for (and I wish I wasn't making this up) "being whores that couldn't keep their legs closed and think of their career"

IBM is facing literally thousands of lawsuits for 10s to 100s of millions of dollars each. The total cost of the fiasco is more than IBM is actually worth.

Even IBM management know the company is going to crash and burn and the remnants sold of, which is why they cancelled Watson etc, and instead awarded themselves gigantic "performance bonuses" for 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. Asset Stripping everything they can before it all goes to hell.

[Will Godfrey]

I wonder if they'll nick all the light bulbs on the way out.

[Anonymous Coward]

"fire anyone they find out is gay or bi"?

In my experience, no they don't. When I worked at IBM I had many managers over the years, including ones from each of the groups that you've highlighted.

On that basis, I'd politely suggest that you're not correct with your blanket assertions, but feel free to provide sources to disapprove my (anecdotal) lived experience.

Over the 14 odd years, I did have a couple of managers who weren't very good, but they weren't racist / homophobic / misogynistic as that would have got them (correctly) fired....

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "fire anyone they find out is gay or bi"?

Different AC. I'm currently on a gig with IBM, and in the wider team I'm working with, I could identify at least half-a-dozen openly gay or bi co-workers. The quotient on non-white people is very high as well. The programme's workforce is anonymously quizzed about whether they feel comfortable working in IBM, and too low a score ends up with the management team getting a rocket for not encouraging diversity.

I don't care how someone manages their outside work life and neither do the managers (one of whom is in the categories above). If anybody does their job well, they're welcome.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "fire anyone they find out is gay or bi"?

Much as I hated IBM and the way they treated their employees when I worked there, I have to agree with you.

IBM spent way more time going after 'expensive' employees (usually that meant experienced and probably older too).

The only misogynistic person I came across was a manager from an IBM partner, and he lasted all of a month before he was gone.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "fire anyone they find out is gay or bi"?

xyz123 seems a bit moody with the downvote - perhaps they should share their own personal experience of working with IBM to counter the above.....

[Lord Elpuss]

"Who the hell still uses IBM?

IBM in emails openly referred to its OWN employees as "useless N-words" and fired them as soon as upper management found they weren't white. THOUSANDS of cases.

Never happened.

"They fire anyone they find out is gay or bi. And there's internal emails referring to them by some horrible slurs.

Utter rubbish. In fact if anything, it's likely the other way round.

They've fired pregnant employees for (and I wish I wasn't making this up) "being whores that couldn't keep their legs closed and think of their career"

Plot twist: you *are* making it up.

IBM is facing literally thousands of lawsuits for 10s to 100s of millions of dollars each. The total cost of the fiasco is more than IBM is actually worth.

Show me on the doll where the nasty IBM touched you.

Even IBM management know the company is going to crash and burn and the remnants sold of, which is why they cancelled Watson etc, and instead awarded themselves gigantic "performance bonuses" for 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. Asset Stripping everything they can before it all goes to hell."

Who knows. Possibly.

[Anonymous Coward]

I do know that IBM (UK anyway) have a strangely unfair way of awarding pay rises. That they seem to give different levels to staff in different divisions ( or whatever they call them) irrespective of the project they're actually working on. So two IBMers working side-by-side on the same project could get different percentage increases.

[Anonymous Coward]

Young family member who told me about this ( hence original AC) reckons that IBM aren't interested in staff retention, even younger ones. That if anything they want them to move on. I assume that IBM's C-Suite managers see their actual staff as an unnecessary financial burden. There's a meme going around some bits of the interwebs to the effect that since they get incredibly well paid for not doing very much that is useful they assume that the same goes for the rest of the pyramid.

[Terry 6]

This does not seem sane or rational. If there are areas of business that they don't want to support, then why don't they just get out of that work rather than punish their staff for being allocated to it?

Is there any kind of reasoning behind this?

If a company making Widgets isn't selling enough widgets it stops making widgets.And if they are making a profit in some other area they simply redeploy staff to that area. They don't penalise the Widget team for being in the widget department. And they certainly don't penalise members of the widget department who are actually working in the profitable section, just because they're on the widget department's books.

[Anonymous Coward]

Control.

They want to control anything they think will increase the money coming in, or kill it off because they have a shittier product they want to push.

[Larry D]

Contract with the devil

My understanding is that IBM GS (now Kyndryl) had a global contract with BMC so their outsourced customers could use BMC products. Typically the BMC products can do more, more efficiently. Sometimes the products are just are just equivalents, like BMC Control-M vs IBM OPC/TWS, in which case having the license arrangement allowed customers to outsource operations to IBM/Kyndryl without having to convert all their Control-M stuff to TWS. Now IBM and Kyndryl have separated this has become contested ground. We have moved from IBM/Kyndryl to another outsourcer (worse than Kyndryl if you can imagine) and IBM are now continually trying to get us to convert from BMC, normally willfully ignoring the complexity and downsides. Our dingbat MGMT entertain these approaches. Just seems like BAU to me.