"...It’s not pretty, but Ginni and Sam doubled down on GTS infrastructure instead of pursuing cloud and AK is stuck with what they left behind. It will take quite some time to repair the damage Sam and especially Ginni left in their wake if it can be repaired at all..."
This statement says it all, but can be very easy to misinterpret for those that weren't there. IBM's vision of future computing was very different from what the rest of the world wanted. IBM's vision consisted of enterprise clients paying IBM for managed computing services, which would be provided by IBM administrators in offshore countries manually provisioning computing resources. IBM would control the entire baseline stack, from IBM hardware (servers) to IBM infrastructure software (z/OS, AIX, DB2, Websphere) and especially IBM personnel (masses of system administrators).
The rest of the world wanted automation. They wanted the freedom to implement virtual machines on either their own hardware (private clouds) or on third-party service providers (public clouds). They wanted to get rid of manual provisioning by human system administrators, along with the time and money that those administrators cost. This was all happening when "lights-out" data centers were just coming into being. Those new data centers were largely unmanned, with only skeleton crews to keep the lights on. The customers for those data centers did not want to replicate the mainframe era, with thousands of administrators required to get anything done. So they did away with them.
The damage you speak of cannot be repaired, because it simply reflects an evolving world. IBM is TOO MUCH...too much money, too much time, too much staff. It's a top-heavy company demanding tribute from a world that does not require IBM technology nearly as much as it once did. It would be different if IBM used its Red Hat acquisition to implement more of what today's world wants (and it sort of does), but all too often it seems that Red Hat is just a vehicle to help sell IBM's back catalog of old hits.