The Power Systems Decline Did Not Have To Be This Bad

April 24, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Thirteen weeks ago, when IBM reported its financial results for its final quarter of 2016, we said that the Power Systems business would decline in every quarter ahead of the Power9 launch, and while this is not a hard thing to predict, it has certainly turned out to be true in the first quarter of 2017. Both IBM’s Power Systems and Systems z machines and their related operating systems were hit by gut-wrenching declines.

The good news, as we have pointed out time and again, is that IBM’s true systems business is distinct from and is a superset that …