Every IBM employee's ambition is apparently to become a manager, and the company's single biggest business. IBM executives don't design products and write software; they manage the design and writing of software. They go to meetings. So much effort, in fact,is put into managing all the managers who are managing things that hardly anyone is left over to do the real work. This means that most IBM hardware and nearly all IBM software is written or designed by the lowest level of people in the company-trainees. Everyone else is too busy going to meetings, managing, or learning to be a manager, so there is little chance to include any of their technical expertise in IBM products.
Go back and read that last paragraph over again, because that's why IBM product often aren't very competitive.
IBM has layers and layer of management to check and verify each decision as it is made and amended. The safety net is so big at IBM that it is hard to make abed decision. In fact, it is hard to make any decision at all, which turns out to be the company's greatest problem and the source of its ultimate down fall (remember, you read it here first).