Ginni is a product of her mentors Sam believed in services (outsourcing and consulting). Ginni doubled down on that and the results speak for themselves. She proved incapable of understanding where the marketplace was (technology wise), where it was going (cloud and Linux wise), or how to get there. In addition to the two major misses cited in the article
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Losing cloud to a book e-tailor
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Losing AI and accelerators to a game player
She had a third major miss via exiting the Intel market place with no viable replacement just as every major ISV was switching to LINUX. Essentially she bet the HW division and IBM’s technology reputation on that exit. It proved disastrous in that Intel filled the ISV void and helped the ISV’s migrate to LINUX on Intel.
The result of those misses has been 24 billion in revenue decline during a 30% per year growth phase, BUT even more importantly a wandering in the wilderness for IBM’s technology. There was no focus or strategic direction given. IBM finally threw in the towel last fall by announcing the purchase of a new strategy (Redhat). Make no mistake, this was buying a “new” strategy for IBM as all of the old strategies have failed. It will be executed over the next two years. Redhat projects will slowly absorb IBM projects, and legacy IBM’er will either get absorbed or be let go. In conjunction with that, expect a co-CEO to be named quickly with the responsibility to restructure IBM including the board and executive management team over the next year or so. The restructuring in general will focus around the 4 core pillars of IBM. Cognitive will be Redhat Services will absorb the biggest changes in that outsourcing and consulting will be refocused into “enterprise cloud implementation offerings” and finally HW will center on Z15 with Power and flash being Niche players in the division. The restructuring will be brutal, and IBM will have to shrink by approx 1/3. Yes it will hurt, but the alternative is even worse.