Lengthy but fascinating read. Some pertinent excerpts pertaining to IBM are below the link.
https://ruayres.wordpress.com/2017/07/11/secular-stagnation-or-corporate-suicide/
"Later in this paper we show that the more the company spends on buybacks, the less it is likely to grow, over a five year time-scale. Companies that have spent a large fraction of their current market cap on buybacks are virtually guaranteed to decline in the coming years. Exxon Mobil (88.7% of market cap is buybacks), Xerox (119.2%) IBM (107.4%) and HP (271.7%) are all in this category."
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"Of this group, 64 firms have spent over 100% of their current market cap on buybacks. This group includes well-known businesses: Sears Holdings, J.C. Penny, HP Inc., CBS, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Motorola, IBM, Symantec, and Xerox. Office Depot, VeriSign, Target Corporation and others have spent well over 90% of their current market cap on buybacks. (Note that HP and IBM were among Lazonick’s top ten largest individual purchasers of their own shares)."
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"What went wrong at IBM? Dedication to ‘main-frame’ computers, treating PCs as “terminals” –and failure to respond adequately to the market challenge for PCs posed by DEC, Compaq, Apple and other nimbler companies in the 1980s was the first cause of its fall from grace. (Why did IBM fail to acquire its step-child Microsoft or its tiny rival Apple when that would have been so easy?) But since the 1990s blind dedication to SVM (which continues) has led to unending emphasis on cost-cutting (by job cutting), lack of product innovation, and misuse of cash to finance corporate stock buy-backs. Between 2005 and 2014, IBM delivered $32 billion in dividends to shareholders and spent $125 million buying its own shares (to prop up the share price), while investing only $111 billion in capital and R&D, altogether. It laid off large numbers of employees.
IBM today is a sad shadow of what it was in my youth. It could have pre-empted most of the innovations stemming from Silicon Valley. Even IBM’s vaunted pivot to services is little more than a transformation to a low-value labor broker. Ironically, the current rush to invest in the “cloud” is exactly what the leaders of IBM expected to happen back in the 1980s. The operating system they invested (and wasted) millions on (OS2) is probably essentially what the “cloud” clients of Amazon, Google and MicroSoft need today. Today PCs are, increasingly, nothing but terminals for cloud computing. But IBM dropped the ball, spend too much money on share buybacks and is out of the IT business (except for artificial intelligence)."