This is no suprise. IBM is NOT a semiconductor company. To think they could swim in the same pond with Motorola, Intel and AMD is a bit arrogant -- but that is Big Blue to the core. This should be no suprise to informed stockholders.
Do you know where that is? IBM is generally doing very well with its semiconductors. The POWER continues to be THE mainframe chip, the Cell is taking off like mad, and the PPC runs a lot of stuff. It just seems that the general purpose desktop PPC970, with Apple's relatively small volumes, wasn't interesting enough to IBM to keep developing up to par.
Couldn't swim in the same pond with Motorola? Apple got on board with IBM for the g5 when motorola's powerpc roadmap stagnated. Not that production of the g5 has been smooth sailing but there are probably less problems than with the g4.
Apple was frustrated because IBM wouldn't produce another powerPC for notebooks, which they wouldn't do because the volumes wouldn't be enough to be interesting to IBM. whatever this says about IBM, it's not that IBM is too minor a player in semiconductors to keep Apple's business, more like the other way around.
Hard to imagine such a person. Anyone "informed" would not be a stockholder.