“Was buying the weather channel fulfilling its fiduciary responsibility instead of investing in something in the computer industry,”
Yes, they paid $2 billion and are selling it for $1 billion but they got back a ROI of about 10% annually in new revenue on their investment, so the “loss” is smaller than it seems.
The “computer industry” is not static, its always changing, and it is not a given that hardware is or must be at the top of that industry, and particularly when it comes to hardware people (as opposed to companies) use. The biggest tech companies today, other than apple, are NOT mostly “hardware” companies. The industry changed and IBM changed with it. IBM’s technology lives in its people/knowledge base and its thousands of patents (it makes over $1 billion a year just from its patents). Much “computer hardware” is, like a lot of computer chips, becoming commodities where volume is high and in many cases profit margins are low. “Hardware” is no longer IBM’s biggest business. Whereas today, IBM is among the top three “computer company” in providing cloud services - one of the fastest growing segments of the “computer industry”. Today “software” earns the biggest single unit share of IBM revenue.
In some ways IBM has reinevnted itself - what it does. And in some ways it is still mainly the “business” kind of compnay - mostly doing business for businesses, it has always been, and what business need, as far as “computers” has evolved with the technology and by the direction of the technology.
Yes they made money from the sale of the weather channel that’s not the point, IBM is in the technology business the spent on the weather channel could have been spent on their core business to make make better computers, offer more services, etc. versus buying a cable channel that has nothing to do with their core business and that’s one of the reasons IBM is basically a forgotten company from one that was the dominant company in the business