Not necessarily sure it'll work out for IBM, but the article brings up an interesting parallel.
In its previous comeback, part of its strategy was positioning itself one layer above the commodity layer. (The article says, "The actual technologies underlying the Internet were open and commoditized, which meant IBM could form a point of integration and extract profits, which is exactly what happened.")
Now with open cloud technologies aiming to make cloud providers (Amazon, MS, Google) into commodities, this new effort also shares that strategy.
Of course the other ingredients are that it must be a value-add that customers actually need and nobody else offers a better version of. But buying Redhat seems like a reasonable stab at achieving that. Overall, their strategy seems to make sense at a very high level.
In its previous comeback, part of its strategy was positioning itself one layer above the commodity layer. (The article says, "The actual technologies underlying the Internet were open and commoditized, which meant IBM could form a point of integration and extract profits, which is exactly what happened.")
Now with open cloud technologies aiming to make cloud providers (Amazon, MS, Google) into commodities, this new effort also shares that strategy.
Of course the other ingredients are that it must be a value-add that customers actually need and nobody else offers a better version of. But buying Redhat seems like a reasonable stab at achieving that. Overall, their strategy seems to make sense at a very high level.