IBM's Lost Decade
It's interesting to talk about what "IBM" has been doing, because after all the A&M IBM has done this last decade, they've actually got plenty of "activity" to their name. Just, activity that was previously known under the names of Softlayer, Cognos, Redhat...<p>Go to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_IBM#Acquisitions_since_2000" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...</a> and sort the table there by value, descending. "IBM" is a shorthand for more (un-dissolved!) subsidiaries at this point than GE or Samsung.<p>IBM itself is just a consulting "solution provider" company that provides "solutions" in terms of the products and services of its subsidiaries. They're never going to look like they're on the cutting edge of some space, unless that's what one of their (equally-stodgy) enterprise clients wants to pay them to do. (And even then, why build when you can buy? IMHO IBM would only ever build a new technology at this point if there was no existing company out there in the market, <i>with</i> that tech IP, that they could just acquire.)<p>Certainly, there's the Watson AI lab, though I don't think anyone's expecting much of it at this point; nor, importantly, <i>was</i> anyone inside IBM <i>ever</i> expecting much of it. Watson (the lab specifically, not the brand strategy of calling all their cloud OLAP SaaS products "Watson") is more a nod to their clients to say "of course we're looking into AI", and a pool of people competent enough that they could <i>clone</i> the existing ML approach of one of their competitors if one of their clients demanded it.<p>IBM <i>could</i> be a really innovative company if they rearranged their talent pool, certainly. But innovation—getting ahead of the market and so needing to educate the market on the problem their products solve—hasn't been IBM's business model since the 1950s. IBM makes money by listening to clients' "unique" needs, and then meeting them with "custom" solutions at low CapEx cost, by using an ever-larger flywheel of existing solutions pre-tuned to <i>almost</i> fit every possible business use-case.