"As it celebrates its centenary, International Business Machines is a business that shows how innovation has accelerated - and how fast you have to move to stay ahead.
The company they called Big Blue was the dominant force in early commercial computing, when mainframes arrived on a fleet of trucks and IT managers used to say "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
But those days are long gone..."
In the mid-1980s, every business major I knew in New York City wanted to go work for IBM... even before a Wall Street job. I was given a night time tour once, of the IBM offices on 57th and Madison by a junior analyst at the time and I thought I was walking into the Starship Enterprise (TNG)... There were card sensors on the glass doors! Young guys in white shirts and ties were still sitting at all the desks instead of sitting in the bars on 2nd Ave... they were making the future.
"...People who affect to be horrified by the power of small fry such as Microsoft and Google have no idea what it was like when IBM represented more than 70 percent of the industry — when it was twice as big as every other IT company put together. To have that kind of power today you'd need annual revenues of well over a trillion dollars. IBM has only managed a tenth of that — $100bn — though it is still roughly the size of Microsoft and Intel combined."
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