The Rise and Stagnation of IBM

It's weird how things have gone. If you told someone in the early 90s that, in 25 years, IBM wouldn't even be making consumer tech anymore and Apple would be one of the biggest companies on Earth, they would have told you you're crazy.

This video comes out and today is my first week working at IBM. What a week.

When you need something to watch with dinner and then see Notification: New upload from ColdFusion: IBM. Yes!!! Dagogo 👏👏👏👏

One of the biggest causes of IBM’s downfall is they chose , CEOs with MBA degrees who worked in other fields besides technology instead of their tech seniors

When MBAs start taking over and engineering excellence is trashed. It happened at HP.

I work with IBM technology in enterprise environments. It's a completely different market. Unfortunately, consumer technology now dominates the mindset of executives, including those employed in companies with enterprise technology. That infection is problematic and even threatens security. There's a reason IBM stepped back from consumer technology. It's important that enterprise grade technology not be tainted by consumer mentality.

Current IBM: 80% legal dept, 20% R&D.

I work in engineering at a software firm, and we still use Fortran extensively. Most of our solvers are still written and updated in Fortran, and some parts still use FORTRAN 66 syntax

Patents yes. I worked at an IBM location a while ago, and they give large bonuses when a patent is awarded. And, that did happen where I was working.

As a kid I always thought IBM stood for International Ballistic Missile...

The Great irony is that IBM was actually in a good position to create cloud computing. They had mainframes and Power PC architecture.

You glossed over the entire point of how competing manufacturers reverse engineered the original IBM PC hardware to sell their own clones. That had more to do with IBM's downfall in that market than Microsoft writing software. "Today everyone should have an IBM PC in their home".. Well, most of us non-Apple-users use IBM compatibles and I'm writing this comment on one, so.. ;)

Outstanding video Dagogo, as always <3

Lenovo's purchase of IBM's PC business is still one of the best purchases ever. Doubled down on years of R & D.

Hope you enjoyed the video, did you know all of these things about IBM. Also thanks to Morning Brew - sign up for free here cen.yt/mbcoldfusion11

What I've been seeing is IBM holding on to a business model, which they've dominated in for a very long time, which involves both consulting and implementation of business solutions. That is, customers come to them, tell them what they need and build it (and typically maintain it). However, this does not mean they are resistant to the emerging business model (hah, it's here already), which involves selling computing capacity (cloud computing), and then training/certifying professionals to build the solutions, as either an employee in an enterprise environment or in a consultancy for enterprise environments. IBM supports this model to the extent that it trains/certifies professionals to work with their technology. But, they've yet to make a big splash in selling computing capacity as a service the way we see in cloud computing. Whether they get away with this remains to be seen. If not, it'll be a very slow death, because they are really good at what they do, despite the blunders with consumer technology. There were lots of entrenched companies that failed to see the writing on the wall.

It's a shame you didn't discuss the mistakes IBM made in the 90s, 00s and 10s. For example Lotus Notes, their PowerPC chips, how they lost the database market to Oracle, or how they missed the cloud.

IBM not forcing Microsoft to make Windows proprietary for their machines was probably ultimately better for the industry as a whole. If it had happened we'd either have dozens of different computers using incompatible operating systems, makign software development a pain, or IBM having a monopoly on the computer market.

IBM is bullish when it comes to raw innovation that may someday turn into a huge market. Imagine first quantum PC!

You cannot stress enough how IBM is stagnated internally. Over my 7 year within the company, they twice failed to migrate to new mail client (Outlook) from IBM Notes. It is staggering how simple mail client that IBMers are forced to use hinders productivity. On daily basis we offer our customers new exciting technologies while struggling to deal with stuff from 90's that we are forces to use in daily work...