Well, many of us may think that we can live without IBM, not knowing that there are indeed many things in our everyday´s life that were invented by IBM. For example, the bar code used in almost every store in the world, as well as the hard disk used in our computers. Small things that greatly changed the way that we work, have fun or simply live our lives.
But not everything is in color when we first think about this giant. IBM could have been the biggest company in the field, such as Microsoft, Apple or Google. But, a series of bad decisions, or combination of bad situations forced IBM to be relegated from the firsts places. A movie (Pirates of Silicon Valley), even not proben to be a real history, showed the lack of vision of an IBM´s employee when affirmed to Bill Gates that "the important thing was the hardware" rather than the software. I believe in this moment (if ever happened) they started to lose an important piece of the tech-cake.
Their products once were the top of the line, such as the punched cards, the personal computer or the super computer Deep Blue, which was used to play a famous chess match against Gary Kasparov. They also sent their technology to the moon, with the Apollo Mission back in 1969.
It seems that today IBM is trying to recover what it has lost over time. After selling its less profitable sections such as the PC manufacturing to Lenovo, it is trying now to make money out of other approaches. Services in the cloud, super computers, servers among others are IBM's new bet to the future.
IBM has also helped other strong technologies to grow and survive. Linux, open source projects and advances in R&D are some of the most important contributions of this giant.
Many things can be said about IBM nowadays, but what is certain is that their innovation , their patents, services and their products have being among us for a long time, and hopefully they will be a lot more.
References:
* http://america.infobae.com/notas/27280-IBM-un-gigante-que-cumple-100-anos
* http://www.elfinanciero.com.mx/index.php/tecnologia/29284-ibm-espiritu-de-la-revolucion-tecnologica
* http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/06/15/ibm.anniversary.gallery/index.html
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