It seems to me that a big risk in IBM's strategy is losing the technological foundation on which most of its current revenues are based and/or not communicating

It seems to me that a big risk in IBM's strategy is losing the technological foundation on which most of its current revenues are based and/or not communicating a strategy for that technological base to its customers. The importance of "big data"/cognitive computing cannot be overstated but it needs hardware on which to run. The neuromorphic computing research is interesting but for the time being the real advances in the field are being made with more conventional hardware and I'm not convinced we yet have a good enough understanding of this field to create an effective new hardware architecture for it. As for cloud computing it certainly has advantages for many types of customers but I think many of the large businesses that represent the lion's share of IBM's customer base will be wanting to maintain their own computing infrastructure for the foreseeable future. They simply will not be willing to trust 3rd parties with their sensitive data, especially in light of the lack of legal protections in the US for data that is in the hands of 3rd parties. So where does this leave IBM's current (or prospective) customers ? x86 is gone. If IBM's strategy is to push POWER as the way forward, that would be great, but are they really doing that or are they going to let POWER wither ? Will customers need to put Lenovo hardware in their data center to manage their POWER systems ? Some customers probably won't be willing to do that (in the US, at least, for other countries trusting Chinese vs. US companies may look like comparable risks). I suspect that a major selling point for IBM's software and services has been its ability to provide the full range of hardware needed to run a data center, from servers to SAN storage. If their transition plans involve giving up this advantage then I think this transition will be a very rocky and risky one that will result in many of their customers looking elsewhere.