> I do not understand how IBM stays in business.
I don't think they do either, judging by my experience working there as an upper-level-support technician 15 years ago.
It seemed like the organization was book-ended with decent brains: engineers and front-line managers were decent to fantastic, and the upper-management seemed to be decent at the time. However, both ends seemed to be choking to death on a hundred layers of middle management. 7 years after Office Space was released and I actually had three(3) managers. Three! I had a technical manager with whom I had bi-weekly meetings where we talked about nothing, a non-technical manager with whom I had monthly meetings where we talked about nothing, and the head of my department who was the only one who meaningfully managed me in any way. (And he was absolutely fantastic.)
For example— they made some big announcements about their impending migration from windows to linux for everybody from admin assistants to sales to developers. Exciting! I loved that linux was getting more professional credibility, and my product ran on Solaris, so having a local UNIX environment would reduce some of the cognitive load for networking, scripting, etc. etc. There was no internal mandate to start the migration yet, but I was too eager to wait. I found the official image on the intranet and started writing documentation for my coworkers. It was pretty smooth! The complex GUI apps like the Lotus suite worked great! Well, as great as they did on windows, anyway. The installer was quite polished! I was excited!
I had one more thing to install— the ancient, internal defect and ticket tracking clients used by every technical worker, product designer, all of their managers, etc. Neither the intranet page for the clients nor the Linux image docs had any info. Hours later, I found a months-old internal note EoLing the Linux port, directing people to use the obtuse CLI instead. No problem— we're all technical people here, right? Problem. The API used by the GUI client supported necessary functionality the CLI didn't. That alone rendered the Linux initiative dead-in-the-water for most technical workers who'd benefit most.
I'm sure the manager who canned the Linux client was solving a very real problem, but a) a decision directly affecting company-wide strategy getting lost in the ether, and b) nobody checking to see if these big overtures were even basically feasible, embodies their organizational shortcomings. (I might have gotten some of the details wrong— it was a long time ago— but you get the gist.)
That's almost certainly why they're getting sued for purportedly blatant age discrimination, too. Managers in the middle with too much sway to have that little top-level visibility solving their problems using means that end up screwing lots of people.
That they style themselves as a technology-focused business consulting company rather than just a tech company is pretty rich.