Was there a defining moment that foreshadowed the decline of IBM?
IBM was the Google of its day before hardware became good, cheap, and readily available. It was where the industry’s top minds would go after graduating from elite schools. They invented SQL, HDD, DRAM, and dominated the mainframe market. But for the past decade it’s been turning into this run-of-the-mill, code factory/consulting shop. Was it just a slow, unremarkable demise? Or was there something to trigger it? Where people looked and thought “yeah, ok they’re no longer what they used to be.” As if they saw through the illusion of genius. TC: 100k
I guess they did not realize how revolutionary internet could be.
WebSphere became so complicated that companies need to hire an army of consultants to get it properly installed.
Afaik Liberty is still horrible to install and maintain
To me it's the failure of OS/2
What’s OS/2?
Now I feel old...
Cold Fusion did a video on the rise and fall of IBM: https://youtu.be/d5lEkz3Bomc
I think it’s because the mainframe market got cannibalized by cheap HP/Dell servers and the enterprise OS market was cannibalized by Microsoft and Linux. There were cheaper and often better alternatives to everything that IBM offered by the mid 90s. Same thing happened to Sun. Cloud computing was the final nail in the coffin. This happens to all big companies, they get fat off a successful product and then they get stuck trying to maintain the market for it while people develop better and cheaper alternatives.
Also the PC x86 architecture got standardized (and cheaper than PowerPC) by Wintel.
What’s crazy is this is not actually true anymore when counting TCO, licensing, support etc
Classic example of the Innovator’s Dilemma. The internet boom really cemented them as “old” and stodgy and unable to adapt. Before then, they were still the best choice for big tech. Of course, everyone was gunning for them from mainframes to PCs with clones.
They didn't capitalize on the success of microcomputers, msdos/windows/Linux took off and os/2 didn't. Lost control of the market when pc clones came out. Their legacy business of AIX, OS/390, AS/400 got eaten away by cheaper alternatives.
I remember doing a project on an OS/2 machine when it first came out (‘89 or ‘90); it was pretty neat.
The built in mahjong game was the bomb. That's the only thing I used it for though...
you can still make 200K+ base at IBM in the right tech role at the senior level, depends on your career aspirations, rest and invest
IBM lost its focus . They became a sales-led org and everyone had a sales quota. Developers were asked to develop sales ready products and started reporting to sales . They made Watson and then just started selling it with no PMF. It became toxic to work at IBM. Even today it’s all about Sales .
I’ll never understand major companies that either go all in on product or sales, and completely neglect the other.
Wow, this is such a good question. I want to see the answers to this