I dunno ... seems to me an indication of a larger systemic problem: "we couldn't even provide a company-wide engineering solution for this simple problem, so here's how we used a hack..."

That's the problem you get with silo'd teams.

If they had a core technology team they could handle things like this more gracefully. Or maybe not, this is IBM after all.

Exactly, it's IBM. As a company, what they do is so diversified in both level of complexity and technology type that a "core technology team" is just nonsensical.

I mean, in the same company you have on one end of the scale lots of teams doing just outsourced IT support ("my corporate word install is broken, pls fix"). And on the other end for instance the IBM Zürich research lab, who have received multiple Nobel prizes in physics and who developed things like Token ring and Trellis code modulation.

This is probably just me but I've yet to see a company pull off a core technology team gracefully.

Sounds like similar stories I’ve heard about IBM but not related to cookies. Sell first and hack it together later which is very similar to a lot of places. Except IBM doesn’t seem to be able to hack it together.

So we have some more info out there:

- Their PCF solution is deprecated - They were still using a deprecated container management solution instead of kubernetes until recently - If you use Java the for you to use liberty build packs - They push XP and TDD practices from the garage yet many of their consultants don't practice what they preach.

IBM Cloud Foundry (formerly Bluemix) isn't quite deprecated but the container manager inside CF was stuck on the deprecated DEAs rather than Diego long after Pivotal and others moved on. They moved to Diego last year I think but very slowly.

And then they rebranded IBM Spectrum Conductor for Containers (look it up!), a Kubernetes snowflake they came up with, into IBM Cloud Private, because Kubernetes will solve all problems, the issues MUST have been leading with a PaaS and not a CaaS, right?

Other observations are spot on

Disclaimer, I compete with IBM and have to deal with their account team shenanigans, though parts of IBM are better than others and even can be good partners.

Don't forget their big "blockchain" push (via TV commercials).

If they don't want the company suffering reputation damage by failings in other parts of the company then they should split or at least run under different brands.

If they want to accept the positives of the IBM brand then they need to accept all the negatives that come with it. Unfortunately for them that brand is now toxic.