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From this IBM stockholder's point of view, writer Cringley is just mouthing nothing more than the usual leftist diatribe against large corporations, which sounds swell to the MSM outlets that provide him with his bread. Wouldn't be surprised if he's offered a job by the Obama administration, which thinks along the same lines.

I happen to be pleased by what IBM has been doing: creating increasing value for its shareholders. Look at the stock price charts over the past few years and you'll see how IBM has been greatly outperforming the market in general, based primarily on its bottom line strategy. That's what a publicly held private corporation is there to do!

Kind of sucks for the 150,000 people they’re getting rid of. And you do have to wonder about how things will be after 2015, laying off to prosperity works as a temporary measure but then you have the whole reduced work production thing. And it sucks for those of us that are going to be stuck competing with those 150,000 for jobs.

I happen to be pleased by what IBM has been doing: creating increasing value for its shareholders.

Judging by IBM's longstanding Smarter Planet campaign, it would seem that that "increasing value" comes from sucking off the public teat.

ML/NJ

“Look at the stock price charts over the past few years and you’ll see how IBM has been greatly outperforming the market in general, based primarily on its bottom line strategy. That’s what a publicly held private corporation is there to do! “

Granted, this style of management does create wealth for stock holders, but America is being reduced to a relatively small “investor class” and a shrinking skilled worker middle class. And where do these displaced American skilled workers go when their jobs are eliminated or “dumbed down” so a non-English speaker can take it over?
Maybe the stock holders will pay our salaries? No?

I am still a few years away from retirement, I hope I can hold out until then.

IBM fell like all the others 4 years ago. The increasing value through 2011 came out of the hides of the taxpayers, or it will.

IBM Is obviously leaving the country, and that knowledge is reflected n its increased market value since then.

You guys aren't fooling anybody.

I agree that shareholder return is the point of businesses like IBM and this guy is contorting things to make a political point about them.

But the question is whether some of that profit was short-sighted or is unsustainable as more effective providers are now considered by their customers to be viable alternatives.

Thanks justiceseeker93.

IBM’s been hanging on by its fingernails for twenty years now, and this isn’t their first downsizing. They’ve managed to continue to play in the big leagues for the very small market for high-performance mainframes, but their penetration of the PC market ended sometime before they tried their PS2 OS gamble.

Around 1980 IBM had hired Microsoft (instead of Digital Research) to produce their PC-DOS, but MS held on to the rights to port it to other hardware, which led to the IBM clone market. Hardware margins (except for Apple, which controls its OS and hardware and doesn’t skimp) for PC makers is about the same as bananas.

IBM’s small box products are things like servers (some are based on the Cell, which is the CPU of the PS/3). I’m not sure about their copier business, but I can’t remember seeing an IBM copier in any office or other business that I’ve visited during the past 15 years, so that’s probably not good for IBM.

MS has gotten more nimble since the Vista fiasco (there was actually a Vista/Bill Gates joke in one of the episodes of “The Big Bang Theory”), and is introducing OS versions with much greater alacrity under its current management. Ultimately the homogeneity of MS-compatible hardware (since “IBM-compatible” is a moribund term) that will result from a single-OS market will benefit Linux and even UNIX, including Apple’s OS.