[Background research: Who was Cassandra?]
IBM announced some pretty bad news today... IBM's PAYING GlobalFoundries to take its chip making facility off its hands and IBM's given up on its HUGELY vaunted earnings plans.
If you're interested in why this may be, take a gander at what Cringely been saying for a long, long time:
The Decline and Fall of IBM
(italics are mine)
Even on the surface, IBM in early 2014 looks like a troubled company. Sales are flat to down, and earnings are too. More IBM customers are probably unhappy with Big Blue right now than are happy. After years of corporate downsizing, employee morale is at an all-time low. Bonuses and even annual raises are rare. But for all that, IBM is still an enormous multinational corporation with high profits, deep pockets, and grand ambitions for new technical initiatives in cloud computing, Big Data analytics, and artificial intelligence as embodied in the company's Jeopardy game-show-winning Watson technology. Yet for all this, IBM seems to have lost some of its mojo, or at least that's what Wall Street and the business analysts are starting to think.
Just starting to think? The truth is that IBM is in deep trouble and has been since before the Great Recession of 2008. The company has probably been doomed since 2010. It's just that nobody knew it. These are harsh words, I know, and I don't write them lightly. By doomed I mean that IBM has chosen a path that, if unchanged, can only lead to decline, corporate despair, and ultimately insignificance for what was once the mightiest of American businesses.
If I am correct about IBM, whose fault is it?
Full Source
Craig Wiseman October 20th, 2014 10:02:14 AM