Is it just me, or has IBM been resting on their laurels for quite some time now?

I fear they have given in to bean counters. They only recently made a lot of experienced staff redundant, their outsourced operations are quite awful (especially in the SAP space), they seem to no longer be able to do infrastructure well, their consultancy division has lost a lot of lustre and it's been quite a while since I've seen anything terribly innovative come out of IBM that made me sit up and take notice of what they doing.

Does IBM have anything going for it any more?

Many people said they succumbed to the low hanging services fruits. It surely isn't the flagship it was. But IBM is old, and still large, they saw many eras, I wouldn't be surprised if they turn it around once again.

A large number of enterprises still deeply rely on them. I definitely don't see them going out of business any time soon.

Just yesterday I was thinking, IBM went too much into 'shallow' software tech. Building a lot of stuff around Java, Eclipse etc that wasn't valuable neither for them or for customers. Instead of focusing on brand and tech, they should bring back talents that solves problems on anything. I'm sure that would sell like hot pancakes.

That's where the money is in software. Expensive middleware.

Short term maybe but it is detrimental IMO.

"nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment".

"but they should".

I say this as a developer forced to work with IBM technologies (mainly WebSphere, and J2EE) for a number of years in the financial industry.

I was an idiot for staying for as long as I did, and my career suffered for it.

I believe their hardware is still superb though, but this market shrunk

Power8. Z/os

Watson? It's got a billion dollars in funding and it seems capable of finding many customers in medicine.