IBM missed the cloud boat by failing to heavily invest in disruptive cloud technology after they purchased Softlayer in 2013. They should have dove into the deep end of this emerging cloud market and gone full blast to disrupt their own SO business and computing hardware businesses and beat Amazon at the Cloud game from the start. Instead they focused on keeping the EPS and stock price up. Now they have badly lost the Cloud market leader game and are considered a Cloud Laggard. It was either a bad bet or executive stupidity that caused this mistake.
Now IBM is destined to go down the road that Nokia took in the cell phone market. Once the dominant player, Nokia was slow to embrace the smart phone since it would cannibalize their other legacy cell phone products. Then all of a sudden Apple and others destroyed Nokia's business as the smart phone became the dominant product and Nokia was left in the dust.
Right now, IBM is being left in the dust. All this talk about Cloud 2.0 and the 2nd inning is a bunch of hot air. No one thinks of IBM when they think cloud. In IT, market perception is everything. Will IBM survive and remain one of the 5 or 6 players in the industry - probably. Will they become a market leader - probably not.