[HN Gopher] The Decline and Rise of IBM (1996) ___________________________________________________________________ The Decline and Rise of IBM (1996) Author : 1970-01-01 Score : 16 points Date : 2023-08-31 05:12 UTC (17 hours ago) (HTM) web link (sloanreview.mit.edu) (TXT) w3m dump (sloanreview.mit.edu) | yardie wrote: | When has IBM been considered on the rise? I thought they just | reinvented themselves into services, sold off the "business | machines", and now just suck at the teat of government contracts | and consulting? They were considered pioneers in AI with Watson | but have been leapfrogged in execution by OpenAI, Microsoft, and | Google. | | So I ask again, what does IBM actually do? | MichaelZuo wrote: | It says (1996) in the title? So the implication is that IBM was | perceived to be on the rise again in 1996? | _hypx wrote: | By using many of the same accounting gimmicks that GE used. | IBM was in near continuous decline from the late-1980s. It's | pretty much a shell of what it use to be. | sys_64738 wrote: | Arrogance of IBM execs flowed into the DNA of IBMers. It's why | those let go struggled to find employment elsewhere in the same | industry. Obsolete technologies and processes that were too | bureaucratic are tough to unlearn. | cmrdporcupine wrote: | Damn, as an ex-Googler, I have to say... uh... I don't know | anything about what might have been going on there :-) | 29athrowaway wrote: | I think Pirates of Silicon Valley makes it clear. IBM did not | think there was much money in software and they were wrong about | it. | Animats wrote: | Yes. There was a time in the early 1980s when a software-only | company seemed unlikely to become big. | | Two examples I was close to: | | Interleaf. Interleaf was the first good commercial document | processor.[1] Released in 1981. Ran on Sun workstations, quite | well. Years ahead of Microsoft Word. The business model was | that they would sell you four workstations, a server, and a | laser printer for about $60,000. In my days at the aerospace | company, we managed, with great difficulty, to get Interleaf to | sell us the software alone, since we already had Sun | workstations, a laser printer, and a phototypesetter. | (Aerospace generates a lot of documents with diagrams.) | | As a software-only company, they could not have obtained | funding, or, probably, generated enough revenue to operate. | | AutoCAD. The story of AutoCAD is well documented in The | Autodesk File.[2] Autodesk was founded in 1982. A software-only | company was not fundable back then. Autodesk started off with | about $62,000 put in by the founders. (Market cap today, $47 | billion.) The term sheets for some VC deals that didn't happen | are in there.[3] "The overall flavour of the deal seemed to us | totally inappropriate for a company which was, at the time of | these negotiations, generating sales equal to the size of the | deal every month and generating after-tax profits close to the | size of the deal every quarter." Autodesk couldn't get funded | on reasonable terms even after becoming wildly profitable. | | It was an interesting time. There was so much that obviously | needed doing and hadn't been done well yet. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interleaf | | [2] https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/ | | [3] https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_32.html ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-08-31 23:00 UTC)