Anyone who would pursue IBM in hopes of 'incubating a startup scene' is, not to put too fine a point on it, grossly incompetent.
> Instead, Ross found herself toiling on what she described as a new-age assembly line — each employee solving a narrowly focused part of a corporate customer’s technical problem and then passing the baton to the next person. As a result, said some of IBM’s Dubuque workers, they became experts only in a narrow set of skills that weren’t easily transferable.
That's exactly IBM's MO: try to solve problems with a smart process executed by low-skilled people. Never mind that a process can never execute judgement, and that low-skilled people executing a process never get the experience needed to develop their own judgement. Never mind that deep knowledge is necessary to solve complex problems.
From IBM's perspective, it's good to have low-skilled people who can't easily find jobs elsewhere: it means lower wages and less turnover (and when there is turnover, imparting a few low skills to new hires is easy!). Never mind that if other places wouldn't want to hire them, then one probably doesn't have a reason to hire them either. Never mind that if one's company is composed of low-skilled employees, then customers don't have much reason to use one's services.