What happened to IBM?

They had vertical integration and made bank. Then each layer got more complex as computing became mainstream, and IBM got out-competed on everyone of them by specialized companies. And then they sold them off. The only layer that remains is the most strategic: the customer relationship.

IBM is now just a consultancy.

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INTPenis 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not much is left of the great IBM, but their Z architecture is still superior when it comes to reliability at scale.

In fact, "what happened to IBM?", they were in the news recently: https://wccftech.com/ibm-worlds-first-dual-architecture-proc...

Creating the world's first dual instruction set CPU.

	▲	guenthert 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Creating the world's first dual instruction set CPU. World's first? What about the VIA C3 (or earlier NEC V20)? I'm sure there are more / earlier ones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_Instruction_Set

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noir_lord 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think that's a little simplistic/reductive.

In some areas IBM still holds if not a technological advantage at least the first among equals position, they just aren't areas that are flashy or generally known outside of folks like us - Mainframes and related technologies for example, the IBM Z series is still a huge player there.

They are also a consultancy though.

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chinathrow 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They still produce the mainframe hardware ranges though.

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anonymous_sorry 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> IBM is now just a consultancy.

Except that they own Red Hat

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TacticalCoder 23 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They royally screwed up by signing an exclusive deal with the back-then no-name Microsoft company. IBM created the 3 trillion behemoth that Microsoft is while killing themselves in the process.

It's really sad but also infuriating: had IBM not fucked up and not signed Microsoft, that mediocre company that Microsoft is would have gone nowhere and we wouldn't have to suffer their turds since decades.

P.S: in their dying breath (and I know IBM still exists), they did commit one billion dollar to Linux early on (which back then was a big deal). When we see the tens of billions of devices that now run Linux, IBM at least partially participated in Linux taking over the world. So there's that.

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smolder 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They became NSC, no such company.

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5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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Nursie 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sometime in the 90s they decided that becoming a services and consultancy provider was more important than being involved in large-scale commodity hardware or really anything else.

Over three decades they've exited commodity hardware (x-series and thinkpads), retreated from a lot of software stuff and generally gone as hard as they can for large-scale business contracts. They seem to keep a decent amount of cutting-edge hardware research going, Power is still broadly competitive with x86 AFAICT, but the volumes have got to be pretty low these days and I half suspect that some of it is just a "Hey look at us we're still here" play rather than actually feeding into products, because services are the profit-centre.

They're still huge and have a lot of money, and they own Redhat. But IMHO it's in a long, slow decline, and it has stepped back from the public eye and most public-facing markets.

Context - I've worked for them in a few places. Obvs my opinons are my own, especially as I've been 'out' for over a decade at this point.