You will have heard of IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat, priced at a 61% premium over closing share prices. This is either a move to snatch a leader and then aggressively scale it, returning multiple dollars in future business for each dollar spent now, or it’s a big gamble with a lot of risk. Your view will depend on your opinion of IBM leadership, but one wonders the rates one would get sticking that kind of cash in the bank. To some extent, this is IBM moving to counter Dell EMC and its VMware wing, to shore up core business while it tries to prove that there’s big money to be made in AI and blockchain (the two buzzwords that…