Good. Much like all the other "isms" ageism is rarely overt but still exists and has real effects. Leave policies and on-call schedules are tuned to make life difficult for those who have to deal with their own or family members' medical conditions. Offices are designed to be disproportionately unpleasant for those who have undergone well known age-related changes in hearing and vision. IBM seems to have gone with the tried and true approach of laying people off based on proxies for age, just as others hire using proxies for race or social class, with "skills" as the shorthand. They'd better be prepared to explain exactly what criteria they used to decide which skills were valuable, how skill levels were evaluated, and how they concluded that layoffs and subsequent replacement hires were preferable to internal transfers (with or without retraining). It's a good thing that more companies are being held accountable for practicing this form of discrimination.