I was previously an IBMer (not US based) until I left a couple of years ago, and I know someone very close to me who has just been offered redundancy from IBM (also not US based).

I appreciate the company's responsibilities are to the shareholders, but their approach seems to be short-sighted.

The culture in IBM seems to be if you are a sales person or a project manager you are the well-treated elite, and anyone else (i.e. the researchers, the developers, designers, consultants - basically anyone who actually makes anything that IBM sells) can go fuck themselves and are treated as dispensable/replaceable assets.

They're painting themselves into a corner - there are only a limited number of times you can get rid of the people on the ground actually doing anything before it really starts to hurt.

I think they've realised this and that is why they are now just buying companies rather than creating their own offerings.

Is it too late? Probably - they are only just getting their act together with cloud offerings whilst a bookshop has become a market leader. I dont think they can catch up.