[throwaway141592]

I was at IBM at the time when Ginni took over. While I'm sad that she didn't have what it took to save IBM, the seeds of IBM's downfall were sown over the preceding decade by her predecessor, Sam Palmisano. This Forbes article sums it up better than I could [0]. In brief, Mr Palmisano decided to focus his tenure on delivering unsustainable earnings-per-share numbers to investors, while ignoring existential threats to IBM's business from cloud computing and other advances in technology. He was handsomely rewarded for this focus. While Amazon built AWS, IBM bought back shares and squeezed cash cow business as hard as it could. The shareholders were happy with that, for a time.

Even at the point of Palmisano's departure in 2012, he had committed IBM to the infamous (for IBMers at least) Roadmap 2015, which promised that IBM's earnings-per-share would rise even higher by 2015. It left increasingly little money for arresting the decline in competitiveness of IBM's products. It is to Ginni's credit that she did eventually abandon Roadmap 2015, though not as soon as she should have done.

When Ginni took over, I remember feeling a sense of relief if anything and maybe a little renewed hope. IBM finally got its head out of the sand and started trying to compete again. The Watson badge that got slapped on anything vaguely related to big data, machine learning and analytics was one of those efforts. It's a shame that it didn't work but it was probably too late by the time Ginni took the job.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/05/30/why-ibm...