It's important to remember that IBM isn't really one entity. They're not just mainframes, or Red Hat, or Watson, or any other one thing. To butcher a TV quote:

It's important to remember that IBM isn't really one entity. They're not just mainframes, or Red Hat, or Watson, or any other one thing. To butcher a TV quote: "IBM is just a convenient name for a group of unrelated corporate interests." So of course they're doing layoffs: at least SOME of the orgs that operate under the brand name have to be struggling. It gets a lot less impactful when the news just bubbles down to: "someone made a bad bet somewhere." It was always coming at a company like this. Now is just the time when these things happen.