> Maybe I'm being naive but what do their 350,000 employees actually do? I used to think it was "make chips", but they contracted that out a few years back. IT

> Maybe I'm being naive but what do their 350,000 employees actually do? I used to think it was "make chips", but they contracted that out a few years back. IT outsourcing is a big part of it, which tends to drive up staff numbers much faster than in-house projects. They're also still fairly big in business tech like POS systems, although I think that's been shrinking? (I suppose the other answer is "IBM doesn't know either", given that they've made huge staff cuts to a lot of their older divisions.)