Eventually that money gets recycled into funding earlier stage companies. (If a company buys back stock, the old investors have to put the money somewhere)
This happens over and over, intel wasn't willing to bet on low margin phone SoC's at the expensive of their laptop/server business. Now those low margin SoC providers are selling a billion chips a quarter and financing a manufacturing behemoth that intel can't keep up with. Same thing with IBM, porting zos/ztpf/aix/i5/etc to x86 and making servers wasn't something they could justify, so they spun the business off to lenovo which grew it 5x, and now IBM is stuck with hardware they can't get enough volume on in a shrinking (but high margin!) business.
If they were selling POWER10 blue pi's for $50 they might have a chance in the edge space or IoT, but that might cannibalize the business elsewhere.
Indeed. But they shot themselves in the foot when they replaced their experienced, expensive staff with low-wage Indian workers (not to pick specifically on Indians... there are certainly Pakistanis and other Asian cultures represented in that cohort).
OpenCAPI, SMT4... and POWER10 has those GDDR modules coming for ~1000GBps memory bandwidths.
They are still so far ahead in Hardware I dont see how they are not innovating.
Software, Marketing, Sales, Operation, Management ..... well pretty much everything apart from CPU / Big Iron related really.