“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 busines”
Technology was the reason for the weathner channel - mountains of weather data collected and owned by IBM, ported onto the weather channel and sold to others. Getting managing monster amounts of data held for sale IS a technology business - just not “computers” the way the average Joe sees it.
They do make computers, the expensive kind that store and manage mountains of data and applications, like in “cloud services” - one of the best growing “computer technology” business areas.
IBM continues to give a good return to stockholders, whether or not retail consumers see what IBM is doing.
I stand by my point IBM was in a business that had nothing to do with their core business and history shows that usually doesn’t end up well.