As a former IBMer, I completely agree with that sentiment. Little of what IBM is good at is sexy but that doesn't change the fact that they lead on many vertically integrated things. Turning back on those things will hurt them in the long run.
IBM still has plenty of sexy hardware stuff - mainframe and POWER (AIX not so much) are pretty impressive.
That z/OS has tens of millions of lines of code surprised me the other day. It's not like it needs to support 23 brands of mouse and dozens of GPU architectures.
There’s not much compatibility for old versions of the OS - IIRC anything older than the hardware itself is not supported at all. Backwards compatibility is for user code.
