The truth is, "opensource software and cloud" disrupted IBM's business model of selling proprietary software that runs on IBM hardware and selling services to maintain these.
(I did say American developers, not Indian developers....)
How do you justify this blanket statement?
Because talented engineers don't want to work on the typical things that get outsourced, such as maintenance of legacy applications, helpdesks, implementation of dull ERP projects and so on. Therefore on average the quality of programmer at an outsourcing company is lower than at a real product company, and this would be the same at any outsourcing company in any country. It just so happens that some locations are cheap enough to make hiring large numbers of low quality engineers seem more attractive than fewer, high quality engineers payed sufficient salaries to attract them.
another assumption without substantiating evidence.
See the comment from @pavanred for some context.
There's a lot of implicit requirements that need to be taken into account when writing code: maintainability, security, performance, user experience, accessibility etc. It's better if everything is explicitly stated, but we don't live in a perfect world unfortunately. (My experience here shows that those implicit requirements are often not well executed, particularly when it comes to front-end code, due to a mix of: lacking experience, time pressure, different UX sensibilities).
Obviously, YMMV.
The Indian firm wanted requirements so detailed that I had to tell them where to put the for loops and while loops. It was faster to just write the code myself than explain such easy details.
The job of a programmer is to map the vague notion of what the software should do, which is reflected in the spec, into a concrete, internally consistent set of instructions to the computer.
Eventually I convinced management that even if we had to pay 2-3x for a competent developer stateside, it was worth the money because of the hidden costs of trying to outsource. The work we were doing required someone to be invested in learning the business and the problems we were trying to solve.
I have never bought an IBM-->lenovo laptop, although I have been provisioned some in various jobs...
What other main product(s) does IBM have that I would want?
they have great eng resources, scientists, etc... but I just dont see any of my money headed their way any time soon...
Some personal thought, execution is key for business success now.
But they still sell a lot of big iron to banks and FIs and try to shove QRadar down everyone's throat.
These days, IBM's competitors are companies like Deloitte, not Dell.
They tack the name 'Watson' on a lot of stuff, but some of that might be good.
Regarding DB/2, I don't think that the installation process is the most interesting property of a database. The database is about as good as you can get, but there are certainly other options.
I tried installing WebSphere portal ten years ago for some reason and that killed my laptop. I'd say that that's probably the best possible outcome...
Oh, and I think TAM/TFIM/ISAM might be ok for companies over a certain size.
Not sure about their cloud offerings. Probably not promising.
As lots of people know that IBM gets 21 consecutive revenue decline and it's forced to cut down cost. But cutting down cost doesn't mean you should shift your development work to under qualified developers or programmers. This will further affect IBM's software quality and hurt its revenue. Why not putting the money hiring less but good developers. If you are a developer, you would find what that feels like to work with under qualified developers.
To be honest, have you heard about any impressive software product or solution from IBM in recent years? I would blame this to a short-visioned management team. Maybe its management team is thinking they could hire more below averaged developers with the same money of hiring one good developer in hoping that quantity can cover quality. In fact that's totally wrong in technology field.
Moreover, those talented technical people are escaping because they are not getting what they deserved. The management team is investing far less in technical talents than in so-called business. The end result is that the product quality will become worse and worse and customers would finally give them up.
While other companies are attracting talented IT people by all means, IBM is lost and it's driving them away.