Do you remember this rumor about 75% cut by 2017? Link below...
Then in April, a story appeared in Personnel Today that quoted Tim Ringo, head of IBM Human Capital Management, as saying that IBM could - notice the word could - reduce its workforce to 100,000 by 2017 by firing 300,000 of its workers and then rehiring them as independent contractors using a crowdsourcing strategy.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/computing/it/ibm-denies-that-it-will-cut-75-of-workforce-by-2017