Nobody here admires Rometty. Another quarter of failure. The question is---if a company is willing to lie about its layoffs; lie about the pace of its transformation---and if a company willfully violates one set of laws--like the age discrimination act---then why would anyone imagine that its accounting morality is any better? Former CFO Shroeter is no angel.
CFO Martin Shroeter reports almost $6 billion of legacy ‘transaction processing software’ in his ‘cognitive solutions’ s. That stuff is mainframe. Refer to the gross margin analysis numbers on page 35 of the 2017 IBM Annual Report. Observe that the Cognitive Solutions segment (which includes cogntive solution software and that base mainframe software) has the highest gross margin: 78.6%; well what if mainframe is dumped in there to juice up poor cognitive solution software performance? That's just what Bob Cringely - who called this out here...NOthing illegal I assume...
https://seekingalpha.com/article/3978821-ibm-1q16-financials-misleading
But what if Martin is stuffing mainframe software even within the Cogntive solution software bucket (which includes analytics)? Is db2 in that bucket? And why is some CICS stuff classified as 'cloud'?
I'm serious--if you are willing to lie with a straight face about firing thousands of workers, and incurring $1B per year on average during $20 Roadkill----then you are just about willing to do anything to get paid---and lie about anything.
If there is accounting fraud--that would be the way to topple Ginny Rometty AND the Exec Management team AND the complicit board. That's the angle here to pursue. I have no special insights on this subject but I'm sure some of you do!