IBM has historically had a 10-1 worker bee to manger ratio. If you drop that down to 5-1 you are still looking at 250-280k worth of worker bees. So there are plenty of places to cut. It’s all about profits, margins, and getting paid without having to invest in feet on the street (IP and patents). IBM discovered that they could off load a large part of their marketing to the channel and save money (you only pay the channel when it sells). Now ask yourself how do you do the same thing in services? Automation, offshoring, IP, patents, and joint ventures come to mind. There are a pile of bean counters right now in IBM doing the spread sheets to decide who it makes sense to replace via alternative go to market strategies. Redhat wasn't Bought for its financial spreadsheet, but rather for its exclusive monopoly power that it delivers vs other LINUX distributors Whether that monopoly power can be exploited is still a work in progress
Sadly, @YIZApV0-1kbc is right. Thought this should be in a thread of its own.