Cheers to all before us and all of us today!
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And like other centenarians, IBM constantly babbles about how great they used to be.
The "birth" of IBM is yet another reason for having an amendment legalizing abortion!
There are a few other that used to be great technology companies for those of you who are perhaps too young to remember: Hewlitt Packard (HP), Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Sun Microsystems
The conditions that created IBM's classic era no longer exist, just as it no longer exists for companies like Apple and Google. All three companies have matured along with the rest of the industry. Each company has inventions that they will always be known for, and each company is, in their own way, resting on their laurels. IBM is on a stable-to-downward trajectory largely because it has nothing new to offer the world, and Apple and Google are not all that far behind. A company's fortunes can change quickly with new inventions and new discoveries, and for IBM's sake I hope it can find some.
They made their poor workers show up in their suits and sock suspenders and sing patriotic, hagiographic odes to their executives, while those same executives carefully worked out ways to sneak around regulations to become top vendors of both the US and Germany during WW2. If Google had a mandatory assembly to sing "praise be to Sundar Pichai, the most thoughtful and wise of us all," we'd rightfully drag them through the mud for it, just as we're right to drag IBM retroactively.
But SP wanted the big celebration before he left so he declared 2011 to be the centennial.
It's a paradox: on one hand, there's outstanding research and patent achievements, yet on the other, a struggle to remain contemporary and impactful. After spending years in Silicon Valley, I joined this company, anticipating insights into the management of worldwide projects. However, I discovered it was all disarray, with the strategy seemingly to allocate more personnel whenever problems arose. A glaring warning sign emerged when they exited the competitive x86 server market by selling this segment to Lenovo, which quickly turned it into their most lucrative venture. IBM's cumbersome cost structure and inefficiency rendered them uncompetitive in most areas except the highly profitable ones. This was followed by financial maneuvers, such as rebranding their software sales as Cloud revenue.