What happened to IBM - PCs

Title of this video: The Story of the Downfall of IBM PCs

Topics covered in this video:
ibm
ibm decline
ibm updates
what happened to ibm
history of ibm
ibm history
the fall of ibm
the rise and fall of ibm
the rise of ibm
ibm story
story of ibm
how does ibm make money
ibm bankrupt
future of ibm
how did ibm grow
what happened to ibm watson
does ibm still sell computers
does ibm still make computers
ibm computers

[jeffj]

When i was in IBM in the mid 1990's, it was still full of hallways of people whose main job seemed to be "attending meetings".
Low productivity and nepotism contributed to the decline.
I was in software development (aka engineer), and many of us left to work with people....who were....well, actually working.

[Derpy]

It was said in the early 80s that it would take IBM nine months to ship an empty box. That’s how bad management was.

[MrJumper]

In 1985 i had savede a lot of monny. I wanted a ibm pc. In Denmark there was 3 ibm shops. I went inside. A guy came in a suit. Ask me what i wanted. I was looking to buy a pc. But I could not get a demo. I could call the shop In copenhagen an buy one there. I got a colone... better and cheaper. Years after, i was working In a news paper as an it chef. With a big budget. We was looking for upgrading the server farm... 50 units. And 700 pc'es.. An ibm was knoking on the door.. looking forward to make a deal. Well we went with another company

[johnathonme]

As an ex IBMer this video is a fun run down memory lane but its totally missing what really went down especially in the 2000s, the PC hardware business simply wasnt core and it was only becoming more commoditized. IBM core income was big govt and big enterprise plus research with revenue licensing inventions. HP did a similar refocus, so did many other mainframe era tech giants. Comparing IBMs journey to Apple and others distracts from where IBM did and does its business today. And for recent innovations look at the z16 majnframe, IBM Watson AI, Cryptography, Cybersecurity and contribution to hundreds of industry standards each year that are critical to their customers . I'm an AWS cloud guy now but still a ton of love for Big Blue and their ongoing relevance!! 😊

[martinschulz]

I remember well the IBM electric typewriters with the ball in typing class in high school, in that time they were very amazing.
I also remember when "IBM compatible" was the big computer buzz term when buying a computer. Good video.

[repatch]

The scary bit for me is you take this story, go forward 20 years, replace 'IBM' with 'Intel', and you have almost the exact same set of events.

[elksalmon]

Greed, corporate greed.

But that's a good point - failing companies are where management are not using products they making, so they are not making those products for themselves.

[rwdplz]

The IBM Thinkpad was THE best laptop you could buy. After the sale to Lenovo, they coasted along on a couple product generations that had obviously been in development at IBM before the sale. Starting around 2009, it just gradually declined.

[jamesgambony]

In 1992 the internal IT group took my functioning XT and replaced it with a PS2 running OS2. But there was no software i needed to do my job.

[davedujour]

Deep Blue is such a great story that is so very simplified by saying it "defeated Kasparov in chess." It was a series of games between Kasparov & Deep Blue, which Kasparov won at first. Between games the Deep Blue programming team would tweak the code. For the last game, that clip where Kasparov gets up in frustration, Deep Blue had been programmed not to go for the quick victory, but to keep the game going, frustrating Kasparov into resignation. It wasn't really Deep Blue that won the game, but the developers who played the very human Kasparov.
Obviously the whole story is more complicated than that.

[mrpawpaw]

IBM died from mismanagement beginning just before Lou Gerstner who came in and finished it off. I worked there for 18 years back then. Saw it first hand.

[kaylemaclou]

Correction:
During the early 1990s, the OS/2 operating system was far superior to Windows. OS/2 incorporated preemptive multitasking from its beginning. Preemptive multitasking was only introduced into Windows in 1995 with the release of Windows NT 3.51. Windows only won because it was much cheaper.

[RyanMcCarvill]

People seem to think this is a video about failure. But, although they made mistakes, it's also about successfully pivoting out of low margin markets and focusing on high margin. They're still one of the world's largest companies, they just don't operate in the consumer space but that doesn't mean they aren't successful.

[KarlHamilton]

Commodore saw the failure of the PCjr and thought, "I'll have some of that", and promptly committed seppuku.

[cstuff]

As former IBM employee who saw much of this from 1987 to early 2000 (first as part of the 'PC company', later as part of the personal software products division, then for a while being solution architect for finance and government customers), this was fun and interesting to watch.

Technically, I could say a few things about the OS/2 and WIndows story, as that is quite a bit more complex than presented here, somewhat understandable as it is more of a footnote in the PC history, and the end result is the same, in the desktop market it failed. Curiously, it is still being maintained, and you can still buy it. It has some (declining) use still in ATMs and similar devices.

Anyway, nice video, quite a bit of a story to tell in 31 minutes, but imo you did touch on the most important parts.

I have no love for Akers, I did at the time understand his line of thought, but didn't agree with it. Gerstner was like a breeze of fresh air, inspiring person, had the privilege to meet him a few times. But, he wasn't perfect, and like those before him, did not understand the PC market.

The Thinkpad was somewhat of a happy accident, somehow the development of the laptop (L40sx, CL57sx) and notebook (n33) machines managed to escape the bureaucracy, and while those 3 are all flawed in their own way (and laptop technology still being in its infancy), they provided the experience needed for the first Thinkpad models. For IBM standards, that went really really fast.

[peterm.eggers]

Supercomputers and mainframes are NOT the same, not even close!
The author of this video has a very remedial understanding of computer technology.

[DanMorin]

I wanted to work for IBM which was about 40 minutes from the place I was living. Unfortunately their bureaucracy and union never let me in because my parents were not IBM employees. As a teenager I ended up working as a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft in the mid 90s for a period of 5 years and then founded my own software company which I am still the CEO. In the end I am glad I never worked at IBM. Their thick bureaucracy would have been an impediment.

[Jasperforex]

Loved it - and loved working at IBM for 17 years too.

[the_kombinator]

No one ever got fired for buying IBM.

True, but no one ever got promoted, either.

[john_in_phoenix]

Cheap clones killed the IBM PC. I worked in the factory in 1981 and watched it all happen.