What will IBM do if the U.S. government tries to lock up masses of Latinos or Muslims? What will your company do?
Or maybe we should boycott Ford, Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes, GM, Coke, Puma, Adidas, Bayer, Siemens, Zeiss...
Further: tech giants have for the last several decades been arming the world's most repressive regimes with information technology. What do you think the Great Firewall of China was originally made up of? Whose databases do you think track activists in Iran and Egypt? What evidence do we have that modern tech companies will do anything different than IBM did, faced with the same "opportunities"?
Rometty doesn't address issues of liberty or diversity in her letter. Offering to work with a man who has openly promoted prejudice and who has given an ally of white nationalists a high-level position in the White House, but not mentioning these issues, I believe is a failure of hers and IBM's obligations as leaders in society. The message they send is: It's ok to overlook these things and continue business as usual.
Imagine if Rometty had said: 'IBM remains committed to diversity and to the freedom of all Americans in our great country.'