It is sad that this has become a shrinking company run by the leadership without any vision for growth.
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grow lol in Australia we had over 14k people working at ibm, around 2014, its now below 2.8k.
Growth requires investment and unfortunately every $ of FCF is earmarked for paying the dividend.
Sadly, the vision has not been for growth, but for shrinkage. IBM used to be competitive in many lines of business...mainframe computers, midsize computers, personal computers, cash registers, printers, displays, network devices, multiple lines of software. Each of those lines of business commoditized in some form or another, and IBM decided to stop competing and sell off the business unit. They could have chosen to become more competitive instead, but the executives opted not to do this.
To put it in economic terms...over the years IBM sold off the means of production in many lines of business, and distributed the funds to executives and shareholders.
IBM is now in catch-up mode...they now have the means of production in a very few product lines (mainframes and enterprise applications), so they are buying whatever they can on the open market so they can blue-wash it (put their name on it and sell it).