The culture in IBM seems to be if you are a sales person or a project manager you are the well-treated elite, and anyone else (i.e. the researchers, the developers, designers, consultants - basically anyone who actually makes anything that IBM sells) can go fuck themselves and are treated as dispensable/replaceable assets.

That's a somewhat-sensible philosophy for a services company/consultancy (whose brand-name is its biggest asset) to take, though, isn't it? The only people IBM has to keep, to keep the lights on, are the salespeople (who introduce new customers) and project managers (who liase with current customers.) Everyone else is a black box that customers won't notice the replacement of. They could outsource everything but those people to subcontracting firms, and "IBM the services company" would persist.