patrick.net

There is one other factor which may be IBM's biggest saving grace and that it's the last man standing, from the era of big iron.

Historically speaking, IBM and HP competed in big servers and services surrounding the data centers. Today, HP is in the toilet and pretty much out of the game. In addition, on the storage side, Dell's purchase of EMC will in effect, hinder that company's potential to execute on anything in the years ahead.

And likewise, as for Amazon Web services as a Cloud competitor, there's only so much server space which AWS can support, without major expansions across the board. And right now, IBM's got enough infrastructure, either alone of through their multitude of partners/clients, to host more application and database servers for Cloud.

Bob Dylan?