Re: IBM
How much longer after that it continues to stagger forward without slaughtering the entire GDF division and selling it to Tata I do not know.
And therein lies the problem. GDF was one of IBM's growth ideas after they tried and failed to own a big share of "productivity" software. Of course, just as the productivity adventure was crushed under IBM's relentless bureaucracy, so the benefits of outsourcing and offshoring turned out to be a mirage for both clients and IBM's investors. Cue panic at Armonk. Everybody runs round like headless chickens looking for the next bandwagon to pile onto. And then two (separate) words spring to mind: Security! Cloud!
In the security space, I'm unconvinced there's any credible proposition from IBM. And in cloud they're arriving at the party five years late, and the technology has bypassed them, and the pricing reached commodity levels.
Ultimately, IBM is like HP, General Motors or the old Motorola: A self serving, heavily siloed, lard arsed bureaucracy that is slowly withering for lack of entrepreneurship. Within all four companies they did enough R&D and product development to have saved themselves. But the cancer of bureaucracy is virtually impossible to remove once it gets hold, risk is forbidden, consensus trumps adventure, and the board play at corporate finance and M&A because that's easier than real work. And so we see a slow drift to irrelevance.
I work in business strategy, and all the time I see a battle between the forces of light (good ideas, passion, risk taking, entrepreneurship) and those of the dark side (inertia, complacency, risk aversion, sloth, bureaucracy). This battle goes on every day in any large business, but at IBM, the dark side has won. It could yet be turned round, but it won't, because the management are entrenched and overly comfortable. They will mostly do very well out of the slow decline - why take a risk, or take on more hard work? And because of the way Wall Street works, even if the entire board were (quite reasonably) sacked without notice and without compensation, unfortunately their replacements would be exactly the same sort of C-suite leeches, with the same selfish values, the same lack of closeness to customers and markets, the same cluelessness, and the same contempt for shareholder value.