[HN Gopher] The Decline and Rise of IBM (1996)
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       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
        
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