In terms of being a going concern for large customers and investors? The make billions of dollars of profit per year, have a P/E valuation better than Apple's, and pay out 4-5% dividends annually.
I'm not sure what it really means to "be dead" for 40 years. In a sense, the average human is "dead" for 70-something years. But periods of time at that scale are called "life", lol.
IBM will be here long after everyone reading this is gone. They aren't relevant to the environments in which most of us work (they're basically a professional services consulting firm), but we aren't everything.
IBMs stock price was $100 in the 2000s. It's only $133 now. If it adjusted for inflation - that would be $173 today. You lost about 25% in real depreciation to get about ~3% per year yield in dividends (taxed as income $$$).
You can do better with Treasuries.
So why take the risk on Big Blue?
Not uncommon for someone to describe a company like this as "dead" - even if it is, presumably, providing some economic value.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/net-income
>The make billions of dollars of profit per year, have a P/E valuation better than Apple's, and pay out 4-5% dividends annually.
For a shareholder, this is little solace when their return compared to the market (a basically risk free rate of return) is negative. 0.64% for the last 10 years, 5.93% for the last 20. SP500 is at 12.4% and 9.8% for the same timeframe, per dqdyj.com total return calculator.