4 ms·
IBM not only still exists, they are massively successful. Today they're worth more than Microsoft, in fact, because of a strategic decision to refocus on sellin
by rtfeldman 13y ago
IBM not only still exists, they are massively successful. Today they're worth more than Microsoft, in fact, because of a strategic decision to refocus on selling to businesses that has worked out extremely well. They've stopped being a household name since they stopped selling to households, but I doubt they're losing much sleep over that.
Microsoft's ratio of popular to unpopular consumer products has been dismal for years; it's hardly unreasonable to think they might likewise do better by refocusing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibm#1980.E2.80.932013 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibm#1980.E2.80.932013
- gnaffle 13y agoI'm not too sure about that. A lot of Microsofts dominance in business comes from the ubiquity of its operating system, while IBM has _always_ been big in enterprise / mainframe computing and research regardless of their "foray" into PCs. Giving up the consumer market to focus on business puts this dominance in danger (even more so than the mobile/tablet threat), because someone might very well and up doing to Microsoft what Microsoft did to the minicomputer makers, and eat their business "from the bottom up". So I think the interesting question is whether Microsoft could survive and thrive on enterprise software/services in an environment where neither Windows nor Office were dominant.