IBM: The Curse of Value
IBM has been wrecked by prioritizing dividends over capital spending
https://investorplace.com/2021/11/ibm-the-curse-of-value/
"If there’s a Mt. Rushmore for short-sighted management, Virginia Rometty is its George Washington."
@aoi+1dQfuBL you're forgetting.... IBM HR uses only the richest, most advanced Watson AI to search the non-Hybrid part of the web! They didn't get to be the best of the best without Watson AI. The things IBM HR knows would astound you. Their cunning makes James Bond seem like a tourist.
What eva HR!!!!
"We get all these HR trolls on this site..."
Seriously... y'all are crazy if you think IBM HR goes out of their way to post on some obscure html looking year 2000 website only a handful of people even know about. I work at IBM as a developer and have been here on and off since 2014 and NOBODY I know at work has even heard of this website - we're talking 3 different roles from Systems to C&CS
working with people from San Jose all the way to Poughkeepsie and in between.. It cracks me up every time all this talk about HR. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Ginni was a disaster!!! You can’t say more than that. She didn’t understand technology, or innovation. (both of which IBM survived on) When the plan moved from innovation and technology to 20 bucks a share IBM’s death was initiated due to financial games. AK is now trying to steal the ship towards innovation. Technology has been abandoned Can he make the transition? Only time will tell, but he can only make it as a much smaller company as that’s where IBM’s niche is at
I did not give you a down vote because I agree with your statements between the first line and the last. But those two lines -
Doing better would have meant leaving the path the company was on. A CEO with half a brain would have seen what they were doing was not going to work long term. It would have taken a CEO with some guts to change course and that might have meant that it could not be an IBM insider.
She was not qualified for the job and the results show.
IMO, the single most important factor in the demise of this company is "Road Map 2015." Not only did it ensure that capital was not being spent where it should have been, it also created a Hunger Games regimen of RAs. In addition, it destroyed so much credibility of our leadership. Despite the fact that the math just wasn't there, VPs kept telling us that $20/share was going to happen and happen by 2015. How do you believe these folks after that?
It was an insane goal and fixating on it was ruinous. We get all these HR trolls on this site often trying to gauge sentiment. To those trolls, I say, you can probably find okay sentiment in people hired in the last 5 years. But for anyone who lived through the horror of cut backs and RAs and mismanagement, if you want to improve sentiment, there has to be a formal apology from the company.
In defense of Rometty, she merely blindly and stupidly followed the strategy of her predecessor, exactly as she had been hired to do, and obstinately continued to do so long after it was obvious to the entire industry that to be a serious contender in public cloud, a company needed to invest massively in capital investments, not diminish itself with dividends and share buybacks, all while insulating herself from the rabble with cushy perks and destroying thousands of jobs, and laying the foundations for a cushy retirement package with "consulting fees", directorships at other companies, and a massive payoff.
Let's be honest, could another CEO really have done better?
Before the Kyndryl spinoff, AK said "the combined amount of the two companies' dividends will be at least as much as the current IBM dividend". No one thought that meant IBM would continue to pay its full dividend and Kyndryl would pay no dividend. It makes no sense, IBM was supposed to be the new-tech growth company and Kyndryl was supposed to me the low growth commodity company. Time to go back to the drawing board.