They're divesting lower performing (but not money losing) ventures in order to not hide the performance of their higher performing pieces. This is so they can show the unsustainable growth that stock holders (still) demand from corporations.
They'll look great on paper for a while as you say, at least until their cloud business fails for some reason. When you average growth over a whole company, you do mask high performing parts with low performing ones... the same is true of cash flow and revenue.
If you get rid of parts of your company that are solid performers but aren't doing as well now, then you're getting rid of some of your safety net in the hope you won't need it.
IBM's most impactful business (in terms of wide use) is probably their research labs. Many, many chips today use SOI and copper interconnect technologies. That sort of research doesn't apply much to the cloud, but maybe they're hoping their AI stuff will.
They're divesting lower performing (but not money losing) ventures in order to not hide the performance of their higher performing pieces. This is so they can show the unsustainable growth that stock holders (still) demand from corporations.
They'll look great on paper for a while as you say, at least until their cloud business fails for some reason. When you average growth over a whole company, you do mask high performing parts with low performing ones... the same is true of cash flow and revenue.
If you get rid of parts of your company that are solid performers but aren't doing as well now, then you're getting rid of some of your safety net in the hope you won't need it.
IBM's most impactful business (in terms of wide use) is probably their research labs. Many, many chips today use SOI and copper interconnect technologies. That sort of research doesn't apply much to the cloud, but maybe they're hoping their AI stuff will.