Good point Marden. It's too bad that employees always seem to take the fall, although at least in high tech they should not have too much trouble getting new jobs! I worked for IBM before electing to trade/invest full time, and left this summer. However, I was around during the bloodbath that started in the late 1980's. IBM topped out with around 406,000 employees, and bottomed in the mid 1990's with slightly over 200,000. Think about it, they let go around 200,000 people! Admittedly, management was at fault for letting the organization get THAT bloated, but the employees took the hit! I remember lots of folks getting hit with a double whammy in that they were long time employees and had placed their retirement funds into IBM stock, so at the time they were let go, the stock was also way down, it got down into the 40's (20's post split now), before Gerstner came on board and the recovery began. Gerstner is getting lots of credit, but he basically performed financial engineering by cutting people and expenses, since even today IBM is not growing much at all! Of course he got options that are now worth 95 million, and just signed on for another 5 years and IBM threw in another 2 million shares for him!!! Then again, guess I should not bash him too much as I had never bought the stock until it cratered, then loaded up, and that's what helped me get out of the place!!!
John |
