What is the ratio of cuts in India vs North America/Europe? IBM for a while has been laying off non-Indians in favor of hiring Indians. Has this contributed to the nosedive?
IBM has three problems that are coming home to roost.
1) They abandoned a large portion of their technology business, and became a consulting & services business. There is very little special about them now, they are almost a commodity business with a famous name.
2) They invested a very large sum of their earnings, not into innovation, R&D, science - but into financial deception and gimmickry. Basically they've attempted to deceive investors by projecting earnings per share growth through share buybacks, while the underlying business was rotting.
3) The consulting & services business they've chosen to focus on, rises and falls with the global economy. The global economy hasn't been great the last six years, and most of the governments of the world are struggling when it comes to spending and budgets. With global economic weakness, even big corporations have been restrained on spending for IT the last six years, there have only been a few bright spots.
Let's hope they still have a strong enough core of smart people to bounce back. IBM is old and have seen this industry nascent and changing many times, they're still massive, thus having the resources to adapt (IMHO). Microsoft managed to bounce too. Kodak didn't.
I'm still very curious about the partitioning of these claimed layoffs.
