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A ~300 page post mortem of a company that is still alive? This isn't Blackberry we're talking about. IBM has (as the author duly notes) huge financial reserve
by na85 12y ago
A ~300 page post mortem of a company that is still alive? This isn't Blackberry we're talking about. IBM has (as the author duly notes) huge financial reserves and can easily stay relevant for another decade IMHO.
It seems like markets and investors have been accustomed to the huge, meteoric rises of a small handful of star companies, forgetting perhaps that plenty of businesses don't need to become household names overnight to succeed.
- herge 12y ago> IBM has (as the author duly notes) huge financial reserves and can easily stay relevant for another decade IMHO. Could we not have said the same thing about RIM in 2009?
- justicezyx 12y agoRIM has never been even remotely close to IBM's market/general-social influence. The comparison is certainly a poor one. By this argument, we can safely say "X is dead, since RIM dies in < 5 years.". Substitute X with any company you can think of. This is obviously wrong, so your argument does not stand.
- xienze 12y agoYes IBM is still alive and will be for quite some time but they have truly sold their soul to achieve short term goals. They are definitely not the same company they were even ten years ago.
- beat 12y ago"relevant for another decade" =~ dead. One could write a similar article for Microsoft, really. I think they screwed the pooch with Windows 8 and Surface. They tried to protect both the Windows and Office monopolies simultaneously in the face of radical change, and lost both. IBM has been the biggest player in enterprise IT since it was done with typewriters and adding machines. For them to become irrelevant, even if it takes a decade, is a huge deal.
- kyberias 12y agoHow was Office ever a monopoly and if it was, how was it lost exactly? I don't get it. It's not irrelevant and it's being used as before. If not, please provide numbers.
- smacktoward 12y ago> How was Office ever a monopoly Ask WordPerfect.
- justicezyx 12y agoIt's relevant in the sense that it is still very important player in the market it participates in. Granted, the relevance is not a fashionable one. By all measures, IBM != dead (for any predictable future period).
- _delirium 12y ago"relevant for another decade" =~ dead. One could write a similar article for Microsoft, really. You have to call the right decade, though. :) The startup community started declaring Microsoft on its death bed in the late 1990s...
- coldtea 12y agoActually it was mid-00s. And they were right. (You might be conflating the startup community with the open source community of the late nineties, members of which did say that Linux was to "soon" overtake Windows in the desktop).
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- _delirium 12y agoYou might be conflating the startup community with the open source community of the late nineties Considering the large overlap between those two communities, I'm not sure it's an unwarranted conflation. The first tech boom included a bunch of Linux-oriented startups and IPOs, whose successful pitch to VCs involved essentially, "Microsoft is on its way out".
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- badman_ting 12y agoI figured people would push back but I really don't see how. Everything about this company sounds totally screwed. It's funny that you bring up Blackberry because what you're saying now is pretty much what people were saying about Blackberry in 2011 or so.
- na85 12y agoIf you look beyond the rhetoric you'll see that Blackberry in 2011 was in a completely different situation than IBM is now.
- pessimizer 12y agoThere are not many businesses that are more of a household name than Big Blue Chip.