Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
IBM is suffering the fate of OPEC countries, except with technology. IBM wasn&#x27;t diversified. (Sure, IBM has lots of products, but it usually sold licenses to all these products in large bundles, rarely did anyone buy just DB2, rather, agreements purchased entire ecosystem of IBM software&#x2F;hardware). 
IBM was built on a single golden goose &quot;massive multi-million dollar agreements with Fortune 500 CTO&#x27;s for thousands of licenses of IBM hardware&#x2F;software&quot;. IBM solved big problems with big, expensive solutions. Nowadays, developers regularly make the purchasing decisions, not upper-management, so FOSS or Freemium products win out over expensive IBM software licenses. IBM hardware is largely dying out because the Cloud and x86 won the architecture wars and no one wants to develop for PowerPC or AIX. So the legacy IBM is dying on the table.<p>IBM is losing its old accounts and old business agreements faster than it can generate new revenue with Softlayer&#x2F;Bluemix&#x2F;Watson. IBM makes 4.5B from Cloud revenue. In contrast, total revenue in 2015 was 81.7B. So IBM revenue is going to be a bloodbath until Cloud revenue can catch up. Unfortunately, Cloud is a razor thin margin business, where Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are willing to sell at, or below cost to gain marketshare, which will likely continue to hurt IBM&#x27;s cloud revenue at a time it needs it most. IBM is the underdog here, so it can not bring any of the other cloud giants to the table and make them end the price wars, so IBM cloud revenue is likely to remain anemic.<p>IBM also suffers from a number of management mistakes. IBM is way behind on automation and lacks the talent, so they&#x27;ve had to make acquisitions and &quot;strategic partnerships&quot; to buy it. IBM previously tried to outsource as much software and operations to China or India, and the unskilled labor available in those countries simply don&#x27;t have the skill sets to do devops or any sort of basic automation. So you&#x27;ve got datacenters where people still ssh into each box and run commands by hand thousands of times because the skill level isn&#x27;t there. But hey, a few quarters of lower labor expenses in exchange for long term growth is a great deal when you can just parachute out.<p>Other mistakes IBM has made includes massive buildup of debt and stock buybacks to inflate the stock price. As bad as the stock looks now, just consider how bad it would be if IBM hadn&#x27;t spent 8B+ buying back stock. These buybacks have largely been financed by new corporate debt. IBM&#x27;s market cap is nearly 40% less than only a few years ago. These buybacks hide a lot of the stock price damage (the stock would be worth about $75 instead of ~$130). In addition, buybacks are  essentially returning money from the corporation to the shareholders, unwinding the assets. This means IBM management has no plans which could return a higher yield to investors than simply handing back their money -- not great for investor confidence or long term future for IBM.<p>Source: Employee.