AT&T eying Atlanta for high-tech innovation center

[rcsteiner]

Originally Posted by arjay57

I thought IBM was still a big deal. Is that no longer the case?

It is if you're a large airline, a large bank, or a large government agency who still depends on IBM big iron. Unless you're like us and still use a lot of Unisys big iron.

IBM still has a huge impact on enterprise computing, even if many of those zBoxes are used as virtual LANs these days and not large data servers.

Most people on the street don't depend on IBM that much. Their legacy is all over the place, but not overtly.

[MathmanMathman]

Originally Posted by Mishap

They're still a Fortune 20 company w/ north of $100B revenue and 400,000+ employees. They just stopped slinging PCs so consumer brand awareness isn't as big a deal anymore. Also it minimizes the fact that a whole lot of their workers are offshore and they're going around buying up IT groups of F500 companies to take over service contracts, layoff the local workforce, and offshore everything.

But IBM was hot stuff even before the PC. The computer industry more or less followed IBM's lead. Pretty much the most prestigious job a computer person could have was at IBM. They were famous for their "no layoffs" policy.

But their business model and that policy were later forced to change if the company was going to survive. A bit ironic as IBM really powered the PC revolution but were too stupid to realize it. I'm still baffled as to why they outsourced their operating system to Gates and Allen and didn't even have ownership of the OS produced for them. IBM should have been able to produce their own operating system. IBM is still a big company but not so influential.

The only thing that exceded IBM in stupidity was Xerox Parc which created so much of what we use today in computing but failed to bring any of it to market. The most famous of which was the GUI interface which Apple more or less stole.

As for AT&T, they produced a lot of innovation through Bell Labs but they don't come close to living up to their past legacy. I guess the lesson for Microsoft, Apple, Google ... is not to become a bureaucratic, slow reacting, lumbering dinosaur with a strategy of using your size to crush your competitors rather than speed and innovation. Arguably, Microsoft is somewhat guilty of some of that now,

[rcsteiner]

Originally Posted by MathmanMathman

But their business model and that policy were later forced to change if the company was going to survive. A bit ironic as IBM really powered the PC revolution but were too stupid to realize it. I'm still baffled as to why they outsourced their operating system to Gates and Allen and didn't even have ownership of the OS produced for them. IBM should have been able to produce their own operating system. IBM is still a big company but not so influential.

IBM has produced multiple influential OSes, both on servers and on the desktop.

You seem to be unaware that IBM was under (or had just finished being under) US federal anti-trust investigation at the time of the initial PC release, mainly for tying their own software to mainframe hardware, and the resulting culture at IBM was quite hesitant to produce their own software for the PC for fear of further investigation. That's one reason why the IBM PC BIOS was so open (which helped Compaq to reverse engineer it), and one reason why Microsoft was able to buy QDOS from Seattle Computer Products and offer it to IBM as a competitor to CP/M.

I find it ironic that Microsoft, a company well known for its tangles with the DOJ, received its initial break in the PC marketplace because of the DOJ.

First, do some research on OS/2. I used it for over 10 years here at home ... it was technically better than Windows in many respects and could run Windows 16-bit programs and Win32s programs as well as Windows could for a while, and OS/2 Warp 4 also came bundled with relatively decent voice recognition and voice navigation software back in 1996, but Microsoft knew how to defend its turf through both legal and illegal means. The story is very well documented. OS/2 even won awards and accolades from the computer press for years, but as we all know the most technically sound solutions aren't always the winning solutions.

There are other IBM OSes which are influential in the server space. z/OS is the mainframe OS descended from OS/360. AS/400 hardware in the midsize server space runs the AS/400 operating system formerly called OS/400.

Of course IBM should have been able to produce their own operating system. They did, multiple times, and they still do. The problem with the PC space is that the incumbent has gotten away with (literally) murder. Can't do much when a party is found guilty and then escapes punishment when a more business-friendly administration steps into office. The DOJ found Microsoft guilty, and effective did nothing to punish them.

Sorry for the potential tangent, but everything that happened had fairly good reasons for happening.