Cutting costs isn't IBM's strategy to get out of the recession. Cutting costs is IBM's strategy. I interned there in 2003, and it was already apparent that they preferred to hire people overseas and let attrition reduce the ranks of folks locally in order to reduce costs. From all the complaints, it was clear at the time that was causing serious problems with R&D.<p>The joke around the office was that we'd replace one person locally with three people overseas, losing the output of two people, since the three overseas people were so clueless they'd need a local person holding their hands full-time. I was doing microprocessor design at the time, and the community is small enough that everyone know that Intel was getting good folks overseas. But even at the reduced wages outside the U.S., IBM was cutting corners and not hiring the best people.<p>Even locally, they try to reduce costs. A friend of mine who stuck around long enough to make it into management told me that they try to keep salaries at about the 40%-ile to save costs. On finding that out (as well as a few other gems), he left. Until I heard that, I couldn't figure why brilliant friends of mine often got raises that didn't even cover inflation. Don't they know that people are going to leave because of that? They know, and that's their strategy.<p>The thing about Bernanke comes out of left field. IBM didn't use low interest rates to invest therefore "the companies that were expected to spend us back to better economic health didn’t do so" therefore low interest rates didn't make the recession less severe than it otherwise would have been? No comment on whether or not those last two statements are actually true (I'm not an economist and haven't studied the issue), but Cringley certainly doesn't make a case for them.