Big Blue's Big Sam gets $10bn for bonus stock boost

No surprises there.

They've just cut car allowances, apparently to encourage you to magically make your car more efficient.

Oh hang on a minute, maybe it's a company-wide pay cut for everyone. Ah, that'll be it.

More government oversite needed

Many large corporations have become nothing but fiefdoms for the top management to pillage. They do insane long term moves just to satisfy short term greed. Corporate boards aren't doing their jobs (even Apple sits on $51 bn that should go back to shareholders). Buying stock when you are near all time highs is fiduciary malfeasance. Since large shareholders can't or won't step in, congress needs to. Corporations need to pay income tax because they are starving their workers of raises and bonuses and local, state and national governments have to pick up the slack. Its a shame companies like IBM lost their way and stopped producing products that people wanted to buy and just became a financial organization intent on milking the mainframe and AS/400 for all it could.

Whilst they've treated me well

There are a lot of pissed off IBMers at the moment. Costs are still being controlled to the penny, raises and bonuses for many are minimal, other benefits are being cut. And then they go announcing massive profits, share buybacks and the like.

It rubs you up the wrong way after a bit. Why should they spend 10 billion on shares when I could do with a new laptop and haven't had a decent raise for a couple of years due to the company moaning about hardship?

Not that good people leaving really bothers big blue, they'll just buy in more. In fact I think that's the plan - buy products, sell them for all they're worth but put as little investment into them as possible, watch people leave and the product stagnate. Buy another one, repeat.

Anonymous posting for pretty obvious reasons.

Somewhere along the line Directors started thinking of themselves as *owners*

Not the highest paid *employees* of a company.

This move is excellent for people on performance related bonuses but likely to do *nothing* for long term business value.

Will the stockholders *do* anything about it? They are the *real* owners after all.

Probably not.

Yes, but....

Unfortunately when you've made your pact with the devil (Wall Street) you have to play by his rules. Rightly or wrongly share buybacks are part of the game. However, I do agree that IBM seems to place way too much focus on its EPS targets which tends to overshadow everything else.

Lets not forget they still invest heavily in R&D and pump huge amounts into developing Risc and mainframe and supercomputer architecture and even Linux and Java - unfortunately these just seems like old news to the outside world.

Maybe if they'd managed to have IBM-inside stickers on the XBox, PS3 and DS they'd have better visibility in the consumer space but in general the margins aren't there unless you can come up with something closed and proprietary that people want to buy and the antitrust authorities will permit - IBM may have the engineering capability but have never been that brilliant at marketing in the retail channel.

Part of the problem is that in the last couple of years innovation at IBM has centered around wishy-washy all encompassing sloganware like the Smarter Planet initiative which nobody really gets. At least the AS/400 and 360 were truly innovative and something concrete that you could sink your teeth into - this is what's missing now.

Shock News

IBM Management are short sighted, greedy, f**kwits!

Hold the Press! *sigh*

Have to agree

At one time - IBM was the business model every aspired to. Hell I built my career on mainframes and as/400, iseries, i5, system i or whatever the hell it's called rthis week.

Their thinking seems to be build a better mousetrap - then don't use it because now what do we do with all that leftover cheese? and how the hell do we justify keeping the cats around? and God help the pest control business.

They went from a company that stood for excellence and execution to one with pockets of competence with short-sighted leadership - ship of fools if you will. Just hope they figure out a means to stay relevant for awhile... still polishing up some other skill sets that show some dynamic thinking for the future.

Ahah.

So that's where my salary increases have gone for the last six years.

Must get myself a new job, IBM has long since been a decent place to work.

The money-go-round

Big Blue regularly buys shares back and regularly gives out options as executive bonuses, down to quite a low level of 'executive'. (Must be low, since it used to include me.) So actually there is a money-go-round that IBM always wins from*, and it does keep the staff who are in line for options dancing in their own shadows, which is part of the goal.

*because they only buy shares back when they're undervalued, and it's the employees who pay tax on the options, if they (the options) aren't in the toilet as usual.

Paris, 'cos I'm not sure she'd understand the con, either.