[HN Gopher] When IBM Was the Center of Gravity (2021)
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When IBM Was the Center of Gravity (2021)
Author : vimy
Score : 40 points
Date : 2022-03-10 00:34 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thediff.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thediff.co)
| tiffanyh wrote:
| _Enterprise_ : buying IBM meant (a) job security and (b) high
| cost. AWS is that today.
|
| _Consumer_ : the Sears catalog was known to be the most
| expansive catalog-of-items to buy from. Amazon.com is that today.
|
| TL;DR - Amazon has won both the enterprise and consumer market.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Around 1990, I remember seeing a book in the cut-out bin of a
| bookstore about IBM and how it was an inevitable juggernaut that
| would consume the world. Wish I'd bought it :-)
|
| All through the 1980s, I heard the same thing - IBM was an
| unstoppable monopoly. It's the exact same thing today, just the
| company is a different one. It changes every 10 or 20 years.
|
| But the fall of the previous "unstoppable juggernauts" never
| deters pundits from anointing the current top dog as an
| unstoppable juggernaut.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| I think there is a possibility that new monopolies learned from
| the old monopoly's mistakes, and they'll perhaps survive
| longer. Not Facebook though.
| throwaways85989 wrote:
| I actually think that facebook is better at surviving then
| for example google. They always were in a anxiety spot,
| chasing the crowd which tried to shake the adds of in a
| rodeo.
|
| Google is not really prepared for a world were they don't
| have a platform for search.
|
| Regardless of my prediction, all of them have spawned Eco-
| systems holding offspring with their cultural"DNA", so we
| will never get rid of them entirely.
| Dig1t wrote:
| I worked at IBM for a year out of college before getting laid off
| as apart of a round of mass layoffs that the company regularly
| does. Joining the company definitely felt cool, especially as a
| new grad. The history alone was pretty neat and I was super happy
| to be a part of something that had had such a big impact on the
| world. After spending some time at the company though, the
| biggest thing that struck me was the quality of the people and
| the mindset of management. IBM pays poorly, raises are
| nonexistent and so are bonuses. My coworkers were not
| particularly smart nor passionate. I honestly believe that a
| major factor in the decline of IBM is the refusal to invest in
| their people. Most engineers and designers are just cogs for the
| many layers of management to shuffle around and use, and the
| managers are more interested in playing the office politics game
| and micromanaging than actually building cool stuff. It's a very
| top-down sort of place but the people at the top and the bottom
| are not very smart.
| beckerdo wrote:
| Additionally, IBM made several good pivots in the 90s and later.
| IBM embraced the world wide web and supported many web products.
| IBM did well for a while with RISC processors, AI, and cloud
| computing. However, I think the expenses out-paced the revenues.
| Taniwha wrote:
| From an outside of IBM point of view IBM limited much of what
| smart engineers could do in life, you couldn't write OSs, design
| computer hardware, etc etc those were all things that (because of
| the way things were structured) were IBM's pervue, it's why
| CDC/etc anti-trust suits occurred ....
|
| Arrival of the microprocessor, Unix escaping AT&T and some other
| changes in that era changed how all that worked, now we could
| write our own OSs, linux came about, a host of new little semi
| startups started making RISCs - and Intel/AMD (and I guess
| Microsoft, though OS has muted that) sort of took over ownership
| of owning the big gatekeeper ....
|
| Nowdays we see RISCV coming along as a disrupter and a 1000 new
| little flowers blooming
| klelatti wrote:
| > IBM's sales centric approach naturally assumed a slower
| industry cadence than the one that developed in the 80s. Rapid
| growth in low-end computers reduced the relevance of their
| competitive advantage in large-scale, long-term deals, ...
|
| I remember one small incident working for IBM as a very junior
| employee in 1984. A customer saw the PC and Lotus 1-2-3 in a demo
| and wanted to buy it there and then - literally got their cheque
| book out. The experienced IBM salesman stepped in and tried to
| convince them to buy a System/36. Result no sale.
|
| I wonder to what extent IBM never really came to terms with the
| success of the PC.
| ghaff wrote:
| Well, they tried to lock things down again to a certain degree
| with the PS/2 and OS/2.
|
| Of course, pretty much none of the older generation of system
| companies really got the PC and PC compatibility. (HP probably
| came closest. Being mostly compatible was still such a dramatic
| shift from the situation in the minicomputer space that they
| largely felt that it was good enough.
| klelatti wrote:
| Indeed. The PS/2 was a symptom of their unease with the PC.
| Had they really pushed their own true PC compatibles much
| harder they would have done much better - Compaq had the
| first 386 I think which is extraordinary.
|
| Just not sure that IBM could adjust itself quickly enough.
| The PC was after all created in a skunkworks.
| boilerupnc wrote:
| "Nobody predicted what would happen next. The first shipments
| began in October 1981, and in its first year, the IBM PC
| generated $1 billion in revenue, far exceeding company
| projections. IBM's original manufacturing forecasts called for
| 1 million machines over three years, with 200,000 the first
| year. In reality, customers were buying 200,000 PCs per month
| by the second year." [0]
|
| [0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-the-ibm-pc-won-then-lost-
| the-p...
| klelatti wrote:
| I suspect those sales were made in spite of much of the IBM
| hierarchy.
|
| Another example IBM in the UK where I was working had a
| headcount limit imposed by Armonk. No matter what their
| revenues they couldn't take any more people on. Did this
| limit their ability to sell lower value systems - seems a
| distinct possibility.
| Animats wrote:
| Oh, IBM from the tabulator rental era, with the Census Bureau as
| the biggest customer.
|
| Here's the shock said to have put IBM into the computer business.
|
| I once had a summer job at the Census Bureau, and got this story
| from someone who had a "Univac I - I was there" certificate on
| their wall. Census had been IBM's biggest customer all the way
| back to Herman Hollerith in 1890. They had acres of tabulating
| machines in Suitland, Maryland. All were rented by the month,
| because IBM refused to sell them.
|
| Census was the first customer for the UNIVAC I computer.[1] The
| UNIVAC I had a long row of magnetic tape drives. At long last,
| they could move from warehouses of punched cards to magnetic
| tape. Sort without manual card handling. Converting from cards to
| tape took several years. It wasn't clear it was going to work.
| But it did.
|
| Then the Census Bureau terminated the monthly rentals on several
| acres of IBM punched card equipment.
|
| That was a huge shock to IBM. Their biggest customer for 70 years
| was done with them. Until then, IBM's electronic computer efforts
| were mostly for the military and the Atomic Energy Commission,
| and the machines were not cost-effective for commercial data
| processing. T.J. Watson Sr. had said he saw a market for about
| five electronic computers. IBM was thinking of computers as being
| for scientific computation, and not cost-effective for business
| data processing. But Census was ordinary batch data processing,
| just on a large scale. The same kind of thing their other large
| tabulating machine customers did. Such as U.S. Steel, MetLife,
| DuPont, and General Electric, all of which soon bought UNIVAC I
| machines.
|
| That's what kicked IBM into making business-type computers, with
| tape drives and more peripherals.
|
| [1]
| https://www.census.gov/history/www/innovations/technology/un...
| cafard wrote:
| With a bit of looking, you can find _A Business and Its
| Beliefs_ by Thomas J. Watson, Jr., published as part of the
| McKinsey lecture series. He does cite the UNIVAC as the shock
| that made IBM understand what it had to do.
|
| Unfortunately, the lectures were delivered before the S/360 was
| announced. It would have been interesting to read what he had
| to say about that.
| dboreham wrote:
| In case anyone else is wondering, Suitland, Maryland is a real
| place, not a metaphor.
| Animats wrote:
| Yes. Federal Office Building #3, Suitland, Maryland, sounds
| like an address from fiction. But it was quite real.[1][2]
| Built in 1941, looked like a reinforced concrete parking
| garage inside. Demolished some time around 2000. The
| computers were in the leftmost wing, as seen from the front.
|
| [1] https://www.census.gov/history/www/census_then_now/suitla
| nd_...
|
| [2] https://www.census.gov/history/www/innovations/technology
| /un...
| digisign wrote:
| Hah, I didn't read it that way until reading your comment.
| mathattack wrote:
| Many years ago (pre-Fbook/Google) I recall thinking "Most of the
| smartest technic people I know are going to Apple" and "The ones
| at IBM are business majors latching onto standards."
|
| After Gerstner saved them from the dead, it took much longer than
| I expected for IBM to flounder. Perhaps this is because they were
| smart enough to not invest (waste money) in new technology that
| they were incapable of building. Yes, for them it was smart. They
| created much more shareholder value buying back stock and
| auditing their existing customer base as they wind the company
| down. It's awful to be a customer of theirs when your
| predecessors let them in the door, but that's how they keep the
| machine running.
| ilovecaching wrote:
| I wasn't alive during the period of IBM dominance, but I have a
| certain romantic view of it. The rapid advancement of technology
| by leaps and bounds, the ability of a single person to write
| operating systems and compilers at the seat of a terminal, even
| the branding and design is something I associate with the heart
| of computing. Ok, maybe I'm more in love with Bell Labs than IBM,
| but there's a part of me that wishes I could have been there and
| experienced the age of the terminal and the beginnings of the PC.
| My generation will probably never experience the same magic.
| We've reached the end of Moore's law and each year brings
| uninspired iterations on the major successes of the past. We're
| born with smart phones in our hands, it's something that we've
| never not known, and that destroys our ability to appreciate its
| value. By the way, if anyone wants to recommend some good late
| 1970s/1980s fonts, keyboard reproductions, wallpapers, etc. I'm
| really into collecting those things. I use IBM Plex Mono quite a
| bit already.
| int0x2e wrote:
| When I first learned about OS internals I felt the save way.
| All the cool stuff has been done. All the good ideas were
| discovered many years ago. If only I was born 20 years
| earlier...
|
| But actually, there has been a lot of progress since then.
| There were plenty of cool ideas and innovations being made.
| It's true that it may not all be ground breaking, but the
| actual rate of innovation is increasing, not decreasing... Just
| think about what your phone can do. It's amazing.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah there's still a lot happening. On the other hand, the
| modern smartphone is really only a bit over 10 years old in
| terms of mainstream impact and there probably hasn't been
| anything else in the tech space that's so directly had a
| major impact on consumers since. (Probably the Web before
| that and the PC before that--to a lesser degree.)
| digisign wrote:
| There's still _a lot_ of work needed to bring a FLOSS
| smartphone up to speed.
| klelatti wrote:
| The diversity of different systems was fun - there was so much
| scope for improvement and it wasn't clear who was going to win.
|
| You might enjoy browsing some of the old Byte magazines on the
| internet archive which give quite a good feeling for the era.
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