Your link is to an article from May 5, 2010. Is that evidence that Cringley is wrong April of 2012? BTW, Why did IBM stop breaking out employees by country recently???
From Wikipedia, In 2010, IBM employed 105,000 workers in the U.S., a drop of 30,000 since 2003, and 75,000 people in India, up from 9,000 seven years previous.
IBM India listed 131,000 employees for 2010, not sure why the difference from above.
Here are numbers for U.S. workers as compiled by Alliance at IBM, a union (UGGGHHH) seeking to represent Big Blue employees (2011 and 2010 are estimates by Alliance since IBM no longer reports jobs numbers by country):
2011: *98,000
2010:*101,000
2009: 105,000
2008: 115,000
2007: 121,000
2006: 127,000
2005: 133,789
I’m sorry, that was sloppy of me. Interesting though that this idea has been kicking around for quite a while.