IMHO, the only remaining golden boys of business are consultants like Bain and BCG, who tell the C-suiters what to think.
Of course, the great secret is that these opt-shops will be the first companies to be fully automated, but invisibly. Then for decades thereafter, human CEOs will blithely continue to follow the lead of their precious Bain-bots, not realizing they've become a bot too (which they always were, of course).
Like many businesses that thrive on enterprise, and particularly government, contracts, IBM's key competitive strength is in knowledge of an expertise in navigating and manipulating the relevant contracting processes.
IBM has a heaping pile of problems, many of which are completely understandable, and in many cases self inflicted due to "poor management". Yet, for many companies/government organizations (particularly large ones with decades of IT systems, frequently tied together with bailing wire from the last merger/spinoff/etc) they remain a choice, simply because buying another zSeries/iSeries/etc is the least expensive/risky proposition. These are companies that have been using IT solutions for decades, and have pretty mature processes, that frequently are damaged by modernization. Its not that these problems couldn't be solved by a modern web stack, or whatever is sexy this decade. It is that there is a working solution, and the companies have a history of trying to replace it, or living through the pain the last time they did. So, they buy a new iSeries every couple years for $250k, when the machine is doing the work of a $5k server from dell, or a couple thousand dollar a year cloud instance. In many cases they buy the new machine/contract/consulting even though there is an in-house project "replacing" it with a java/php/node.js/whatever stack, and the resulting product still isn't done. So, they pay IBM to tweak the current solution a little so it works on an phone browser (or whatever) instead of throwing the whole stack away and struggling with the 1/2 baked replacement. Sometimes they try to pay IBM to replace a solution, and the same thing happens, only its some other consulting company that comes in an quietly buys another iseries/hp nonstop/etc and continues on with business as usual. So, if you have been in IT for any length of time you realize that its not just IBM. The industry is littered with failures, many quietly hidden behind NDAs. In fact there are statistics floating around about modernization projects at large organizations, and they aren't pretty.
All that said, IBM has some really bright people working for it. They produce things like the POWER8 or FS900 which are fantastic pieces of technology. Although having fantastic pieces of technology isn't necessarily by itself a recipe for success. If it were, we would all be using VMS on Alphas. That said, you can frequently see the WTF, in IBMs products. The proprietary DIMMs that were originally used in the "scale out" POWER8's, or the mess that is the firmware on the linux only power machines. Two problems that would have been much better if IBM had just stuck with industry standards and made them work from the beginning (standard DIMMs and UEFI) rather than thinking they were special snowflakes and creating further barriers to the use of their technology. They like all the other really big tech companies, drink far to much of their own cool aid. Particularly when they are slowly declining.
It seems that wherever I go, everyone has something terrible to say about them, but they still keep getting huge contracts that they fail to deliver on.
Is there someone here who can reasonably explain why they like IBM?
Because I can't understand it.
And I congratulate Queensland, Australia for banning future contracts with them for the next fifty years. (QLD can't contract to them for 50 years).