[dralley]

disclaimer: Red Hat employee, which technically means IBM employee

They do innovate, it's just that the places where they have been putting all their flashy marketing over the past couple of years have not been the places where they've been innovating.

They have not one but two custom CPU architectures designed entirely in-house (POWER and Z) which they've kept competitive over the years (in terms of hardware if not price). They're one of a very few entities (corporate or academic) at the very leading edge of quantum computing and one of the few builders of high-end supercomputers (#2 and #3 most powerful computers in the world at the moment are POWER systems)

The problem is that while they are legitimately extremely good at many things, those things make up a small fraction of the "surface area" of IBM and it's not what they have have historically been strategically emphasizing for the past couple decades. The average engineer's experience with IBM is more likely to involve their software products and consulting services and/or sales team than it is any of those things I mentioned.