IBM’s $67 billion wipeout is more than a historic one-day selloff — it’s a warning that enterprise tech spending is shifting faster than the company anticipated. The company’s extraordinary pre-announcement, issued a week before its scheduled earnings report, revealed disappointing results driven by an abrupt change in where customers are allocating their IT budgets.

In June, businesses responded rapidly to the worsening memory chip shortage — which is forecast to send prices up as much as 355% this year — by prioritizing spending on servers, storage and memory.

As a result, customers deferred purchases of software, consulting and mainframes. IBM blamed itself for not adapting quickly enough — which caused “numerous large deals [to] fail to close on the timelines we expected, driving the majority of our shortfall,” noted IBM’s pre-announcement.

If IBM’s July 22 second-quarter report forecasts better-than-expected software growth, the stock could quickly recover. If investors are disappointed with that report, the stock could lose significantly more value.

IBM’s........

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