Ginni Rometty is leaving IBM with work to do

Ms. Rometty announced yesterday that she will step down as the embattled tech icon’s C.E.O. this spring. She became one of Corporate America’s top women leaders — but couldn’t finish turning around her own company’s fortunes.

Since becoming C.E.O. in 2012, she pushed IBM further into businesses like cloud computing and A.I., buying up plenty of companies to help with that. Last year, she oversaw the $34 billion takeover of the Linux distributor Red Hat, IBM’s biggest deal ever.

Ms. Rometty was also one of the longest-serving female C.E.O.s in America and a role model for many executives. And she was outspoken on issues like whether companies should focus on more than shareholders.

But she struggled to make IBM more relevant:

• The company still relies more on slow-growing hardware and software businesses than cloud computing, A.I. and data analysis.

• Shares in IBM fell 25 percent during her tenure, while those in Microsoft jumped 500 percent.

Her successor will be Arvind Krishna, an IBM lifer who runs its cloud division and helped spearhead the Red Hat deal.

It’ll be up to him whether IBM enjoys a Microsoft-type revival — or a Nokia-type slide into irrelevance, write Jennifer Saba and Antony Currie of Breakingviews.