I agree some people seem to say these things with an unrealistically short timeframe in mind. But I think when most people say a very large company is in trouble, they're talking much more meta, because they understand that 50+ billion dollars takes decades to burn through.

Alan Mulally, arguably one of the most effective modern day leaders, has a great quote about his [former] company: "We have been going out of business for 40 years." This is what most people are talking about.

Was he talking about Boeing, Ford, or both?

He said this about Ford[0].

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2007-06-03/the-new-h...

It’s like saying IBM is in trouble in 1980. Of course it’s not, it’s a very strong company. But...

IBM is not the same company it was in the 1980’s. Lou Gerstner laid off 100,000 people in the early 1990’s. Now most of its employees are non-US based:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/technology/ibm-india.html

I think that was exactly the point :)

IBM is a perfect example. The trouble was really not trouble at all. They felt the tremor, but that's it.

IBM is a withered husk of it's former self.

Adjusting for inflation IBM is worth more now than it was in 1980 and it's been kicking off a lot of dividends. Calling it a husk is misleading. Sure it failed to keep up with the growing size of the PC market, but that's a long way from failure.

The pie has become gigantic but their share of the pie has reduced to pretty much zero% from close to 100%.

They never got close to 100% and they still make ~1/4 what google does so that's far from nothing.

I've heard on the grapevine that they've been selling off real estate and other capital to stay in the black.

I don't see how that's generating 10+ billion per year in profits. Their P/E is 12 and they are worth ~130 billion. It would be one thing if they where nominally profitable, but that's a lot of money.

If you stop R&D and coast you can have outside profits for a while until your share erodes completely.

I don't think IBM has positive ROI for their R&D costs. They are mostly just a consulting shop so cutting R&D is probably a long term net gain.