[HN Gopher] 100 Years of IBM
___________________________________________________________________
100 Years of IBM
Author : the-mitr
Score : 54 points
Date : 2024-05-10 10:25 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tikalon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tikalon.com)
| Nursie wrote:
| Again? They had one 12 years ago!
| caleblloyd wrote:
| Yea that was on display at my onboarding in 2012. The 1940s
| segment skipped over the complicity towards their German
| partnership with the Nazis in the Holocaust so it was pretty
| lost on me.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Why did former giants like IBM and AT&T became insignifiant? It's
| bad management, it's ossification? Are Microsoft, Apple and
| Google condemned to the same fate?
| ikari_pl wrote:
| IMHO Google may be a good example. They shifted their entire
| philosophy from innovation to securing their profitability. And
| it seems there's nothing more boring to the media than a
| company that's stable.
|
| IBM is not insignificant, it just doesn't get much attention in
| the headlines.
| bee_rider wrote:
| "The Innovator's Dilemma" came out in the 90's, but I bet it
| would still be an ok place to start (I haven't actually read
| it, but it is a famous book).
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Duuuude, you honestly should read it
| waldothedog wrote:
| Seconding! It isn't the easiest read, but there are some
| good lessons/concepts
| Aromasin wrote:
| There's a good podcast called Acquired. Highly recommend it.
| They're private equity guys who cover the history of companies
| and what made them great, and cover the topic very well.
|
| For IBM and AT&T, from what I gather it seems like they missed
| out on multiple waves of new technologies because there wasn't
| a market for it, or the revenue was so low it wasn't worth
| their time. They were market maintainers, not makers. They also
| rested on the fact that they were the incumbents, so made the
| incorrect assumption that people would always default to them
| out of convenience.
|
| Your second question basically falls back to whether FAANG make
| the same mistake; resting on their laurels while some small fry
| breaks into a market they deemed too small to serve.
| waldothedog wrote:
| The essence of the "innovators dilemma"
| abhiyerra wrote:
| I really liked their recent one on Microsoft. They cover how
| intertwined Microsoft was in the early days with IBM. IBM did
| notice the trend towards PCs and made it a skunkwork project
| out of Florida to remove it from the IBM bureaucracy.
|
| Second there is a book called "The Difference between Larry
| Ellison and God" which was about the early days of Oracle.
| Oracle's SQL database was built entirely on research from IBM
| and a bit from Berkeley. IBM was slow to commercialize on SQL
| but the reason SQL is a standard is because of IBM.
|
| But one of the interesting things that the podcast covers is
| that IBM was so large and powerful they were stymied to make
| the big moves necessary because it would have led to
| antitrust action. So even though we think of it as ineptitude
| there was a reason that they missed the mark.
| kitd wrote:
| Wish I could make $60Bn and be insignificant.
| suprjami wrote:
| IBM had decades of trash CEOs who focused on returning
| shareholder dividends at the expense of literally everything
| else.
|
| You know what's really expensive? Employees! Fire the lot. Send
| their wages to the shareholders and cheaply outsource every job
| possible.
|
| Ginny (former CEO) spent years turning this around and only
| just managed in her last quarter or two. Arvind (current CEO)
| is the first person they've had in forever who has real vision
| and understands the modern tech industry.
|
| IBM is a big ship to turn but it's slowly modernising and
| trying to become relevant to more people besides AIX mainframe
| renewals. Arvind wants IBM Cloud to displace AWS/GCP/Azure
| which is certainly aiming for the stars. Even if they get 20%
| of the way there that'll be huge.
|
| I'm not saying IBM is a guaranteed growth share but they at
| least seem to be out of their death spiral.
| bequanna wrote:
| What kind of market share does IBM cloud have? Seems like
| they are more than a decade late to the game.
|
| I work with F500 clients on data projects and have never,
| ever heard anyone mention "IBM Cloud" as an option.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It's because staying on top is really really hard. The default
| expectation should be that a company doesn't stay on top.
| sgt101 wrote:
| Well, AT&T was so insignificant that the government broke it
| into 8, 7 regional phone companies and a core continental
| provider. The core (AT&T) then sold its tech capability
| (Lucent). One of the bits (South Western) then ate the core and
| decided to call itself AT&T once more, now it's one of the
| biggest (13th) companies in the USA again.
|
| However, the internet meant dumb core, smart edge. This, and
| regulation meant that telecoms companies have struggled to make
| themselves relevant to consumers. Any attempt to do so
| (undermining net neutrality) generally inspires rage in
| everyone. Technical change has lead to the situation now of the
| core just being what happens in data centres and between data
| centres - everything else is just noise. Telcos weren't able to
| raise the funds to invest in cloud at the rate that Amazon,
| Google and MS were because they had other investment pulls
| (3,4,5G, FTTH) and much less free cash - and so they got shut
| out.
| unixhero wrote:
| I work in a Telco Fortune500, thanks for a great argument for
| why telcos didn't innovate.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| AT&T had free cash flow of 26.8 billion and EPS of $3.40. They
| run the largest 5G cell phone network in the US.
|
| I'm not sure that's insignificant or that they can be referred
| to as a "former" giant.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Companies form, grow, get old, and die. Like organisms, they
| start out fresh. They slowly accumulate errors, parasites,
| inefficiency, unable to adapt to a changing market, etc.
|
| The persistent idea that companies naturally grow into
| monopolies that take over the world has never actually
| happened.
|
| For a recent example, Walmart was supposed to be one of those
| monopolies that take over the world. Yet they've been
| complaining to the FTC that Amazon is competing unfairly with
| them.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| I live in a city where Walmart doesn't exist
| qrian wrote:
| Why are there so many links to irrelevant wikipedia links, such
| as [wood], [woman], and [boon]? Did they just run a software to
| tag every noun with a wikipedia article?
| rahkiin wrote:
| They're giving Wikipedia the hard-needed inlinks for search
| engines.
| lionkor wrote:
| Cant tell if you're being serious or sarcastic
| OJFord wrote:
| Sometimes I wish Wikipedia would get more JS-y, and have no
| hyperlinks as such in text, but you could click on any word (or
| something) to go to page if it has one.
|
| Because I've had this the other way around too, where it's not
| linked and I have to go there myself because I actually do want
| it. (And that can also be because the word was linked elsewhere
| on the page.)
| hajimuz wrote:
| Technically the name of IBM is 100 years old. But the company is
| 110 years old now.
| hggh wrote:
| > But the company is 110 years old now
|
| Almost 113 ("14th day of June 1911"):
| https://books.google.ch/books?id=_8tFAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA3428&redi...
| Animats wrote:
| IBM's own video at 100.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59haQ44b7Uc
| l1k wrote:
| "They Were There"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmVCePfMXAU
| JSDevOps wrote:
| Old school mentality of work 70 hours a week 9 - 5 and unpaid
| overtime chained to a desk and you'll get promoted. Except when
| you don't when we need to save cash because of you know
| dividends.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-05-11 23:01 UTC)