Oldster Teaches Young Dogs Some Tricks
March 1, 2019
It can be easy to forget just how long IBM has been around compared to other huge tech companies, but that venerable giant was incorporated in 1911. An article at The Conversation examines “Lessons from IBM for Google, Amazon and Facebook.” Writer and former IBM employee James Cortada, author of the recently published book, IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon, shares his observations. He observes:
“There is a difference between individual products – successive models of PCs or typewriters – and the underlying technologies that make them work. Over 130 years, IBM released well over 3,600 hardware products and nearly a similar amount of software. But all those items and services were based on just a handful of real technological advances, such as shifting from mechanical machines to those that relied on computer chips and software, and later to networks like the internet. The transitions between those advances took place far more slowly than the steady stream of new products might suggest. These transitions from the mechanical, to the digital, and now to the networked reflected an ever-growing ability to collect and use greater amounts of information easily and quickly. IBM moved from manipulating statistical data to using technologies that teach themselves what people want and are interested in seeing.”
The write-up goes into more depth on the progression of IBM advances, emphasizing that the company’s success comes more from developing technologies over time than from sudden breakthroughs. Cortada notes that, unlike IBM, Microsoft, and Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook have yet to evolve away from their original functions. Those internet-born companies, he advises, can last out the century if, and only if, they adapt to evolving technologies as IBM has done.
Cynthia Murrell, March 1, 2019
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