IBM’s Fall From World Dominance

Fixing the Future

IBM is a remarkable company, known for many things—the tabulating machines that calculated the 1890 U.S. Census, the mainframe computer, legitimizing the person computer, and developing the software that beat the best in the world at chess and then Jeopardy. The company is, though, even more remarkable for the businesses it departed—often while they were still highly profitable—and pivoting to new ones before their profitability was obvious or assured.

The pivot that people are most familiar with is the one into the PC market in the 1980s and then out of it in the 2000s. In fact, August 2020 marks the 40th anniversary of the introduction of the IBM PC. Joining me to talk about it—and IBM’s other pivots, past and future—is a person uniquely qualified to do so.

James Cortada is both a Ph.D. historian and a 38-year veteran of IBM. He’s currently a senior research fellow at the University of Minnesota’sCharles Babbage Institute, where he specializes in the history of technology. He was therefore perfectly positioned to be the author of the definitive corporate history of the company he used to work for, in a book entitled IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon, which was published in 2019 by MIT Press.