Make no mistake the Red Hat purchase is a Hail Mary play to mask the steady and consistent failure to manage strategic choices effectively by the Board's choice of CEO. The goal "then" was to reinvent the company into high margin high growth business, while tapering down the low-low.
Unfortunately when you're last to the starting gate and slow to make bold moves you lose. This company will continue to shrink by another 35% with margins dropping 5-10% before it reaches maturity. A strategist seeing this would say cut deep, cut fast and transform. Instead it has been a migration strategy which, so far, has cost the investor some 200% of return on investment vs. the S&P and even more against the tech index.