What the heck are you going on about? IBM sold a division of their hardware business to Lenovo, who apparently didn't agree to absorb all of the personnel IBM had supporting it, so they're -- poof -- redundant. IBM obviously wasn't making much, if any, money selling x86 servers, and it's perfectly reasonable that they couldn't find obvious positions for xx,000 people whose jobs and specializations suddenly don't exist anymore. This is as cut & dried as these things can be. Compare, for example, to the preemptive huge cuts many technology & manufacturing companies made in 2007 (the smart ones, foreseeing what their soft 2007 market would turn into in 2008++) and 2008 (the either less savvy or more empathetic/hopeful companies). "Sorry, we're cutting a large portion of our workforce because we're pretty sure the market is going to tank and we need to mitigate our risk exposure to the downside." That doesn't go over nearly as well with employees as "Sorry, we sold the division you work for and the buyer didn't want you."

I work in contract electronics manufacturing, for Sanmina, and in Oct-Nov 2007 we laid of 16% of our global workforce of ~50,000. Compared to our competitors who waited until 2008 (Jabil, Celestica, Flextronics, Plexus, Benchmark, etc), this ended up being a very smart decision. Just compare the stock prices of each company over the past five years. In 2003 we won the PC & Thinkpad manufacturing business from IBM, which accounted for about $3b/yr in revenues over each of the subsequent five years. Revenue, not profit. We only made about 1-1.5% profit on that ridiculously tight margin commodity hardware business. In 2008 we sold it to Foxconn & Lenovo, much like IBM just sold their x86 server division to Lenovo. It is a smart purchase for Lenovo because they have ready access to cheap manufacturing capacity and they operate at a scale that allows them to negotiate much better deals throughout their supply chain than IBM could. This is the same reason Foxconn, Pegatron, Compal, & Quanta are [roughly] the only ones making money hand over fist building consumer products: either they negotiate exclusive deals on high-demand, high-margin products (e.g. Apple) or they just operate on such a huge scale that they get optimal prices on direct material and freight. It's impossible to compete, which is why the smaller (say, $3-10b/yr revenue) EMS companies have intentionally focused on low vol / high mix / high margin areas over the past 5-7 years. This includes things like defense goods, medical products, network infrastructure (especially microwave & optical/fiber), robotics, and similar complex or highly regulated products.

In our deal, we had to layoff a few people, but not too many and mostly direct labor (factory workers) and lower level business management. We "sold" a full 10% of our global IT staff to Foxconn in the deal, and they took over a high percentage of the business folks responsible for the business, too. Why? Because they wanted to ensure continuity in the marketplace.

This just isn't something Lenovo needs very much of from IBM for server support. They're already a hardware company and already have the same or similar functions in their existing org. If these people being laid off are good, they'll be in demand and easily hired elsewhere. It's not like the Indian domestic market is suffering lack of demand, and it isn't like US companies aren't still clamoring for an increase in the H-1b limit (not to mention all the L-1/L-2 visas out there).