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> Under her watch, IBM acquired a cast of companies and tried to assemble a cloud computing arm with little time to do it.

IBM's problem was that consulting and legacy products (think mainframes) are still making money and what the company is known for. These two products aren't attractive for the type of engineer you need to build a world class cloud. This, coupled with less than stellar compensation meant that the critical talent required simply went somewhere else.

What they should have done is invest in cloud computing startups, keep them separate entities and act as a sales channel for these products, for legacy customers only.