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The most interesting quote for me: A federal judge agreed, ruling in October that with the “overall inferiority of its proposal,” IBM “lacked any chance of win

• hga 12y ago
  On the other hand, further down, that cloud offering is being retired: "[CEO as of 2012] Rometty’s most significant investment has been SoftLayer Technologies, a smaller rival to Amazon in selling cloud computing to companies. IBM paid $2 billion for SoftLayer last summer, in the middle of its bruising CIA fight with Amazon, and afterward began to wind down its own corporate cloud product." Whether SoftLayer's people can survive in IBM's culture ... well, look at this compared to, oh, Watson, Sr's 1911 "THINK": "Last year [Rometty] began distributing black plastic cards bearing the phrase “One Purpose: Be essential” to IBM’s roughly 50,000 managers and has been known to demand to see them as she walks the halls. At IBM, even clarity is complicated—on the back of the cards are three values and nine instructions for making customers happy, including “Unite to get it done now” and “Treasure wild ducks.”" And while the article doesn't mention that services as a business line are typically a race to the bottom, it does go into how the cloud looks like a game of thin margins, which doesn't fit IBM at all. Lots more bad news further down.