Everything will make sense when you realize that IBM is a consulting company. They don't care about building great products. In fact building self-serve products will directly take away from their consulting revenue. They instead need to be good at marketing and selling their services. Watson was exactly that - a marketing demo that got them in the news cycle and helped them sell a giant wave of contracts under a single brand to unsuspecting CIOs of legacy non-tech companies. Every acquisition helps with this goal. Red Hat - locking companies into licenses and support contracts for the OS. HashiCorp & Confluent - locking companies into support contracts for their cloud infra.