As far as anyone can tell, dead wrong, but then there are still headlines about "massive worldwide layoffs." Not that 5000 is a small number, but IBM is a large company.
Are you referring to "the IBM"? The company with a Market Cap of $150 billion, larger than Google, Apple, Cisco and every other IT company except Microsoft? There's a big gap between what is true on the web and what is true in reality. IBM is very much alive and kicking, still building mainframes and whatnot.
"IBM hasn’t dominated the tech industry since the early 1980s. Most founders today weren’t even born when the last antitrust case was opened into it. The share price is up 9x since then, and IBM shipped its highest-ever volume of mainframe computing capacity in…. 2020!"[1]
Never played around with one. But it must be working so reliably well in some specific field ( I am guessing Accounting and Finance ) that those end users, not engineers or IT, but actual people using the system dont want it to be replaced, only upgraded.
This is not true. IBM produces a ton of software (spanning a range from terrible to excellent, quality-wise). This is where much of their profit comes from now. They still produce a bunch of hardware, mostly at the higher (and legacy) end.
ex-IBMer here, product side: GTS sometimes had better private pricing and incentives for products from competitors that other business units couldn't match due to internal pricing policies.
Now try explaining to the customer why IBM is recommending an IBM's competitor while IBM is also offering the same product with a better price directly to the customer. It doesn't make sense at all.
Consider two service-focused business units (GTS and GBS) that sometimes are complementary but mostly adversarial and it is chaos for the customer.
Spinning-off GTS (and I dare say, GBS too) is better for the customer and for the product business units.
They are far more of a services and support company than a tech company these days. Their current tech is mostly used by their services teams to implement solutions.
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