At some point, IBM decided catering to wall street was more important than doing real work. Take a look at Cringely's articles on IBM. I've known people that worked as contractors at IBM Almaden and as the transition was occurring, they went out of their way to not end up on the radar -- the impression I got was that management being aware of your project was a risk for being cut. This was even worse for the rank and file full timers.
IBM used to invest in it's employees. My advisor was of a generation where if you saved IBM X dollars in terms of research patents, etc, you were well supported as time went on. Additionally, they had a culture of investing in their employees. I don't know when the change happened... I want to say sometime in the mid/late 90s things shifted and have since.
Sounds about right, yes IBM did also change when they focused more in offering services. Became slower in there replies too issues but still got there. One project I came across was issue with SAMBA and logging around the year 2001 and quickly knocked up a wrapper for the SAMBA code to trap and log what was needed to be logged. Took IBM a week to confirm my 30 minute solution would work and was the right approach and then they only ended up at that conclusion after talking to Jeremy Allison.
I worked for a company once that had a suggestion box. If you made a non-anonymous suggestion that wound up saving the company money you got 10% of the savings over 2 years. While I was there no one got rich off of it but a few people got some nice bonuses. I don't understand why more people don't do this.
IBM used to invest in it's employees. My advisor was of a generation where if you saved IBM X dollars in terms of research patents, etc, you were well supported as time went on. Additionally, they had a culture of investing in their employees. I don't know when the change happened... I want to say sometime in the mid/late 90s things shifted and have since.