Despite the vote of confidence Warren Buffett has given to International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM) via his large holdings in IBM stock, the company continues to be ridiculed as the one of the most poorly run large tech firms in America. Shares are off 23% over the past two years, compared to a 15% improvement in the S&P 500. Buffett’s support, which is generally deemed a near perfect measure of a public company’s present and bright future, has been greeted by investors as if it did not happen.

Ginni Rometty has been CEO since 2012. Her attempt to improve IBM’s fortunes is based largely on remaking it into a 21st century operation with cloud computing and Internet-based products as two of its primary foundations. Instead, IBM is viewed as a throwback, with revenue supported by hardware and 20th century-centric software and services. Each of IBM’s legacy divisions have shrunk or are struggling to find growth. Its cloud business and new initiative areas have not grown, nor is it likely to, fast enough to fill the gaping holes.

Another issue that has plagued Rometty’s tenure was sticking by the financial engineering for too long. The company only abandoned its quest for $20.00 in earnings per share by the end of 2015 late in 2014, after it was obvious it was too large a promise. The company had been cutting costs and buying back endless numbers of shares to reach that goal, but IBM is now expected to average earnings per share of close to $16.00 in both 2015 and 2016 — on roughly zero revenue growth.

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The primary fiction management has spun is that its relationships with companies like Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) will buoy it. There is no evidence that these relationships have translated, or will translate, into significant revenue. It also promotes its Watson super-computer as another sign of a reinvented IBM. Watson’s artificial intelligence capacity and voice recognition makes it something of an enterprise version of Apple’s Siri. However, Watson can beat humans at chess and Jeopardy. Watson is, among other things, IBM’s foray into big data. Granted, IBM has some Watson customers, the most prominent of which are in the medical sector. The open question is whether Watson, like IBM’s cloud initiative, will replace sales from rapidly shrinking businesses. The Wall Street consensus, based on share price, is no.

IBM is a public relations machine, which may hurt it in the eyes of investors. So many of its press releases say nothing about the company’s ability to make money. For the U.S. Open, its PR was typical:

IBM is teaming with the United States Tennis Association (USTA) to bring a combination of predictive analytics, cloud, mobile and social technologies that will enable tennis enthusiasts to follow every US Open serve, volley and match point in real-time. Whether they are courtside at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in New York, watching from home or keeping up on the action and scores on their mobile device, tennis fans will have cutting-edge technology to stay connected with the tournament.

The most recent press release about Watson says nothing about its prospects, which investors desperately want to hear about:

The IBM Watson Health Cloud for Life Sciences Compliance will help biomedical companies bring medical innovations to market more efficiently. This first-in-class solution will help the companies fast-track the deployment of a GxP compliant infrastructure and applications while adhering to stringent requirements for hosting, accessing and sharing regulated data.

IBM Watson Care Manager is a population health solution that uniquely integrates capabilities from Watson Health, Apple’s HealthKit and ResearchKit, a software framework designed by Apple to make it easy for researchers to conduct studies using an iPhone. It allows medical professionals’ to factor a broad range of determinants into a personalized patient engagement program, with the intent to vastly improve individual health outcomes.

Where is the long list of clients paying large sums for use of these products and services?

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Another press release recently said a good deal more:

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced second-quarter 2015 diluted earnings from continuing operations of $3.58 per share, down 15 percent year-to-year. Operating (non-GAAP) diluted earnings from continuing operations were $3.84 per share, compared with operating diluted earnings of $4.43 per share in the second quarter of 2014, a decrease of 13 percent.

Second-quarter net income from continuing operations was $3.5 billion compared with $4.3 billion in the second quarter of 2014, a decrease of 17 percent. Operating (non-GAAP) net income was $3.8 billion compared with $4.5 billion in the second quarter of 2014, a decrease of 15 percent, significantly impacted by currency, an increase in workforce rebalancing charges, and a year-earlier gain from the divestiture of the customer care outsourcing business.

For the second-quarter of 2015, IBM reported consolidated net income of $3.4 billion or $3.50 of diluted earnings per share, including operating net losses in discontinued operations related to the Microelectronics business.

Total revenues from continuing operations for the second quarter of 2015 of $20.8 billion were down 13 percent (down 1 percent, adjusting for currency and the divested System x business) from the second quarter of 2014.

Is there a silver lining here? Just one quarter of better earnings would allow Wall Street to believe IBM has something more than the promise of the cloud and Watson.

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While one recent analyst upgrade has been seen, the reality is that IBM shares continue to languish in 2015. With shares close to $145.00 on Thursday, IBM’s 52-week trading range is $140.62 to $195.00, and its consensus analyst price target is down to $157.81.

Now consider that IBM’s closing price in 2014 was $160.44, for a 12% loss in the year. At the start of 2015, analysts had a consensus target price that was more than $8.00 higher than today.

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