Out of the cloud race, IBM’s desperation shows

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Editor's note: IBM’s cloud efforts are in tatters. In the very first edition of Oversize, over a year ago, I wrote this as Arvind Krishna took over the reins of the company: The 2010s did not go well for IBM. Its market capitalization peaked at a little over $240 billion in 2012; today, it’s less than $110 billion. Now, Big Blue has a new cloud-savvy CEO and is fresh off one of the biggest tech acquisitions of all time. But can it reverse a decade of declining revenues and shed off its image as a boring, old tech enterprise? From the outside, it didn’t look unlikely. Like IBM, Microsoft—another old enterprise hand and long-time rival—under Satya Nadella had turned around its fortunes with Azure despite being late to the game and trailing behind the market leader, Amazon Web Services. By the time Arvind took over, it became clear that IBM had missed the cloud. The steady decline of its business and technology reputation coincided with previous CEO Ginni Rometty’s tenure. Under Rometty, from 2012 to 2020, revenue declined 28%, i.e., a staggering …