Re: Transformation
No, I think IBM will prevail,
Bollocks. No, they will not.
The IBM of old continuously produced ideas, including fundamental science, engineered them into products and produced products. They held the IPR on these and this is exactly what allowed them to:
1. Charge an obscene rate for some of their products.
2. Invest into more R&D and as a consequence more products.
3. They were pretty much unique in this - most of their competitors failed to produce in-house innovation and "innovated" through acquisition.
4. While there was lots and lots of waste and dross produced as a part of this cycle, as any engineer and scientist will tell you having failed experiments is key to advancement. You cannot succeed if you do not fail.
This cycle was broken by their previous CEO who started trimming all parts of IBM which showed failures from time to time just because beancounters do not like failures on the balance sheet. Jinny despite her engineering background is continuing exactly on the same trajectory - cut R&D some more where it has failed, cut a few more branches here and there where there is a failure at present. And another one withers... and another one... and another. Until a death of a thousand cuts.
So any ideas that IBM will become great are delusional. It is slowly overtime narrowing itself into a set of services industries +/- some support for them as product. That is a race to the bottom competing against Logicalis, Accenture, Atos, HP, etc - you name it. When you have 4 of these competing for a contract any ideas that the winner of the contract will command a premium comparable to a high tech system for which you hold the unique IPR is utterly delusional and exists only in beancounter's wet dreams. It is not founded in reality.