The synergistic additional revenue from software providers / businesses that have been lumped together over decades through mergers and aqcuisitions, and sold as a collection of loose bolts to be assembled by a bunch of expensive consultants may no longer be an appropriate model.
Being slow as molasses and expensive as he-l with a large amount of doubt over the final performance of the solution(s) sold sprinkled all over the customer(s) is not a good position to be in. Customers want to buy /lease leapfrog type technology and functionality and eliminate redundancy and write-offs in their IT and Operations budgets.
They too can no longer afford such unwanted expenses. IBM needs to go small. Break up the company and create several buckets ie businesses and eliminate the " grow the size of the order and lock the customer in" as their main objective. That is exactly everything the customer does NOT want. Think about that!