The result of all this is that IBM management has lost touch with reality. I see that the author needed some connective tissue between the bit about The Fed an

The result of all this is that IBM management has lost touch with reality. I see that the author needed some connective tissue between the bit about The Fed and IBM's cloud plans but any IBMer/ex-IBMer can tell you they're out of touch. The disagreement is about when they lost it. Most, including this author, will point to whenever the domain they're experts in was mismanaged to hell. But IBM will keep on trucking right past their foray into "the cloud," constantly chasing the latest fads, and letting older divisions wither and die because nobody in charge understand the tech domain well enough to salvage them.