Why ibm failed

Other benefits of registering an account are subscribing to topics and forums, creating a blog, and having no ads shown anywhere on the site. Click here to Register a free account now! What happen to the IBM computer? Started by moon , Jan 31 AM. Page 1 of 2 1 2 Next. Posted 31 January - AM I was reading IBM had a monopoly over the hardware and software in the 60s, 70s and early 80s no other company.

What happen to monopoly laws than? Did IBM have other goals? IBM was failing to compete with the new breed of innovative software companies and hardware producers who could make computers much more cheaply. In the early s, IBM made a painful transition from selling computers to selling services and software.

Then: Apple made the Personal Computer fashionable. Maybe it wasn't quite as simple as that, but not far off it. Edited by wee-eddie, 31 January - AM. Posted 31 January - AM ETexplorer said: IBM was failing to compete with the new breed of innovative software companies and hardware producers Exactly on point.

Posted 31 January - PM A long while back, must be 15 years or so, I use to drive through Rochester, Minnesota, on a regular basis. When I first saw it, I knew it was their server assembly facility. There was a huge cut out of Tux, right on the front of the building. Posted 03 February - AM ETexplorer said: IBM was failing to compete with the new breed of innovative software companies and hardware producers Exactly on point.

Posted 05 February - AM They didn't really control the standard - that's why clones appeared. Edited by jonuk76, 05 February - AM. Posted 05 February - PM Pretty rudimentary at first but has now become a monster. Truer words were never spoken!! Posted 05 February - PM In the early s they were faced with a massive class action law suit forcing them to sell off their personal storage division and then ultimately their personal desktop line of computers to lenovo.

Posted 06 February - PM ETexplorer said: IBM was failing to compete with the new breed of innovative software companies and hardware producers Exactly on point.

Reply to quoted posts Clear. Site Changelog. Sign In Use Twitter. Need an account? From IBM's perspective, a new and vast market quickly turned into an ugly battleground with many rivals.

The company stumbled badly, its bureaucratic approach to product development no match for a fast-moving field. IBM did not invent the desktop computer. Most historians agree that the personal computer revolution began in April at the first West Coast Computer Faire. Both machines were designed for consumers, not just hobbyists or the technically skilled. Indeed, software for these new machines was largely limited to games and a few programming tools.

IBM's large commercial customers faced the implications of this emerging technology: Who would maintain the equipment and its software? How secure was the data in these machines? And what was IBM's position: Should personal computers be taken seriously or not? By , customers in many industries were telling their IBM contacts to enter the fray.

Y, and Poughkeepsie, N. The logical place to build a small computer was inside IBM's General Products Division, which focused on minicomputers and the successful typewriter business. But the division had no budget or people to allocate to another machine. Cary decided to fund the PC's development out of his own budget. The normal process to get a new product to market took four or five years, but the incipient PC market was moving too quickly for that.

Cary authorized a secret initiative to develop a personal computer outside of Big Blue's product-development process. Cary asked Lowe to come back in several months with a plan for developing a machine within a year and to find 40 people from across IBM and relocate them to Boca Raton, Fla. Lowe's plan for the PC called for buying existing components and software and bolting them together into a package aimed at the consumer market.

There would be no homegrown operating system or IBM-made chips. The product also had to attract corporate customers, although it was unclear how many of those there would be. Mainframe salesmen could be expected to ignore or oppose the PC, so the project was kept reasonably secret.

A friend of Lowe's, Jack Sams, was a software engineer who vaguely knew Bill Gates, and he reached out to the year-old Gates to see if he had an operating system that might work for the new PC. Gates had dropped out of Harvard to get into the microcomputer business, and he ran a person company called Microsoft.

While he thought of programming as an intellectual exercise, Gates also had a sharp eye for business. In July , the IBMers met with Gates but were not greatly impressed, so they turned instead to Gary Kildall , president of Digital Research, the most recognized microcomputer software company at the time.

Kildall then made what may have been the business error of the century. He blew off the blue-suiters so that he could fly his airplane, leaving his wife—a lawyer—to deal with them. The meeting went nowhere, with too much haggling over nondisclosure agreements, and the IBMers left. Gates was now their only option, and he took the IBMers seriously.

The idea of putting together a PC outside of IBM's development process disturbed some committee members. The committee knew that IBM had previously failed with its own tiny machines—specifically the Datamaster and the —but Lowe was offering an alternative strategy and already had Cary's support. They approved Lowe's plan. Lowe negotiated terms, volumes, and delivery dates with suppliers, including Gates. IBM wanted Microsoft, not the team in Boca Raton, to have responsibility for making the operating system work.

That meant Microsoft retained the rights to the operating system. Back at Boca Raton, the pieces started coming together. The team designed the new product, lined up suppliers, and were ready to introduce the IBM Personal Computer just a year after gaining the management committee's approval. How was IBM able to do this?

Much credit goes to Philip Donald Estridge. An engineering manager known for bucking company norms, Estridge turned out to be the perfect choice to ram this project through. He wouldn't show up at product-development review meetings or return phone calls.

He made decisions quickly and told Lowe and Cary about them later. He obtained microprocessors from Intel , made sure Microsoft kept the development of DOS secret, and quashed rumors that IBM was building a system.

The Boca Raton team put in long hours and built a beautiful machine. The big day came on 12 August Estridge wondered if anyone would show up at the Waldorf Astoria. Some people crowded into the hotel. Estridge described the PC, had one there to demonstrate, and answered a few questions. The IBM PC was aimed squarely at the business market, which compelled other computer makers to follow suit.

Meanwhile, IBM salesmen had received packets of materials the previous day. On 12 August, branch managers introduced the PC to employees and then met with customers to do the same. Salesmen weren't given sample machines. Along with their customers, they collectively scratched their heads, wondering how they could use the new computer.

For most customers and IBMers, it was a new world. Nobody predicted what would happen next. IBM's original manufacturing forecasts called for 1 million machines over three years, with , the first year. In reality, customers were buying , PCs per month by the second year. Those who ordered the first PCs got what looked to be something pretty clever. It could run various software packages and a nice collection of commercial and consumer tools, including the accessible BASIC programming language.

For some corporate customers, the fact that IBM now had a personal computing product meant that these little machines were not some crazy geek-hippie fad but in fact a new class of serious computing. Corporate users who did not want to rely on their company's centralized data centers began turning to these new machines. Estridge and his team were busy acquiring games and business software for the PC. They lined up Lotus Development Corp.

And Cary's decision to avoid the product-development bureaucracy had paid off handsomely. In came the XT's successor, the AT. During his tenure, Opel remained out of touch with the PC and did not fully understand the significance of the technology. We could conclude that Opel did not need to know much about the PC because business overall was outstanding. The company was routinely ranked as one of the best run. The media only wanted to talk about the PC.

On its 3 January cover , Time featured the personal computer, rather than its usual Man of the Year. IBM customers, too, were falling in love with the new machines, ignoring IBM's other lines of business—mainframes, minicomputers, and typewriters. Don Estridge was the right person to lead the skunkworks in Boca Raton, Fla. Estridge's 4,person group mushroomed to 10, He protested that Corporate had transferred thousands of programmers to him who knew nothing about PCs.

PC programmers needed the same kind of machine-software knowledge that mainframe programmers in the s had; both had to figure out how to cram software into small memories to do useful work. By the s, mainframe programmers could not think small enough.

Estridge faced incessant calls to report on his activities in Armonk, diverting his attention away from the PC business and slowing development of new products even as rivals began to speed up introduction of their own offerings. Nevertheless, in August , his group managed to release the AT, which had been designed before the reorganization.

The company had no experience with this audience, and as soon as IBM salesmen and prospective customers got a glimpse of the machine, they knew something had gone terribly wrong. Salesmen ignored it, not wanting to make a bad recommendation to customers. IBM lowered the PCjr's price, added functions, and tried to persuade dealers to promote it, to no avail. ESD even offered the machines to employees as potential Christmas presents for a few hundred dollars, but that ploy also failed.

IBM's relations with its two most important vendors, Intel and Microsoft, remained contentious. Rivals figured out that IBM had set the de facto technical standards for PCs, so they developed compatible versions they could bring to market more quickly and sell for less. The notable exception was Apple, which set its own standards and retained its small market share for years.

As the prices of PC clones kept falling, the machines grew more powerful—Moore's Law at work. By the mids, IBM was reacting to the market rather than setting the pace. Estridge was not getting along with senior executives at IBM, particularly those on the mainframe side of the house. Then disaster struck. Over the Dallas airport, feet off the ground, a strong downdraft slammed the plane to the ground, killing people including the Estridges and all but one of the other IBM employees.

IBMers were in shock. Despite his troubles with senior management, Estridge had been popular and highly respected. Not since the death of Thomas J. Watson Sr. Hundreds of employees attended the Estridges' funeral. The magic of the PC may have died before the airplane crash, but the tragedy at Dallas confirmed it. While IBM continued to sell millions of personal computers, over time the profit on its PC business declined.

IBM's share of the PC market shrank from roughly 80 percent in — to 20 percent a decade later. By then, Windows had been on the market for two years and was proving hugely popular. It was already clear that Microsoft was going to become one of the most successful firms in the industry. But Lowe declined the offer, making what was perhaps the second-biggest mistake in IBM's history up to then, following his first one of not insisting on proprietary rights to Microsoft's DOS or the Intel chip used in the PC.

In fairness to Lowe, he was nervous that such an acquisition might trigger antitrust concerns at the U. Department of Justice. But the Reagan administration was not inclined to tamper with the affairs of large multinational corporations. More to the point, Lowe, Opel, and other senior executives did not understand the PC market.

Lowe believed that PCs, and especially their software, should undergo the same rigorous testing as the rest of the company's products. That meant not introducing software until it was as close to bugproof as possible.

All other PC software developers valued speed to market over quality—better to get something out sooner that worked pretty well, let users identify problems, and then fix them quickly. Lowe was aghast at that strategy. Salesmen came forward with proposals to sell PCs in bulk at discounted prices but got pushback. The sales team I managed arranged to sell 6, PCs to American Standard, a maker of bathroom fixtures.

But it took more than a year and scores of meetings for IBM's contract and legal teams to authorize the terms. Lowe's team was also slow to embrace the faster chips that Intel was producing, most notably the The new Intel chip had just the right speed and functionality for the next generation of computers. Even as rivals moved to the , IBM remained wedded to the slower chip. As the PC market matured, the gold rush of the late s and early s gave way to a more stable market.

A large software industry grew up. The cost of performing a calculation on a PC dropped so much that it was often significantly cheaper to use a little machine than a mainframe. Corporate customers were beginning to understand that economic reality.

Opel retired in , and John F. Akers inherited the company's sagging fortunes. Akers recognized that the mainframe business had entered a long, slow decline, the PC business had gone into a more rapid fall, and the move to billable services was just beginning.

He decided to trim the ranks by offering an early retirement program. But too many employees took the buyout, including too many of the company's best and brightest. Gerstner Jr. It did not matter that Microsoft's software was notorious for having bugs or that IBM's was far cleaner.

IBM was still the third-largest producer of personal computers, including laptops, but PCs had become a commodity business, and the company struggled to turn a profit from those products. All are businesses far more profitable for IBM than its personal computer unit.

IBM already owned 19 percent of Lenovo, which would continue for three years under the deal, with an option to acquire more shares. Ward Jr. And it's coming in the next three to five years. AI capabilities are spread across many different devices to impact many facets of our life and how we interact with each other.

The cloud, too, will be an essential part of this equation as the information gets transferred back and forth. So imagine you have all sorts of intelligence that is being applied across many kinds of devices to interact with the least amount of latency due to 5G. A great user experience is at the center of it all. We'll see a lot of early use on multiplayer gaming on smart devices.

Those environments are graphics-heavy, with people communicating rapidly in an active social environment. Latency issues and bandwidth issues are so key to making it a real-time and fun experience. Another application will be social media involving real-time video recording and sharing between your friends and family. Recording, streaming and downloading all require this kind of functionality.

These capabilities will touch many different aspects of our world. As autonomous driving starts to become more prevalent, you will have multiple networks that pass information to the cars so that they are safer and we have fewer accidents. On the factory floor, in an industrial environment working with 5G, every machine will now know exactly what to do with the right timing. Our Snapdragon platforms will continue to pack leading computing and connectivity technologies to deliver premium experiences across devices segments.

We are investing more into the Snapdragon brand and recently created a new fan community called Snapdragon Insiders to bring the latest Snapdragon product news to tech enthusiasts globally. Tune in to our annual Snapdragon Tech Summit on Nov. If yes, this note is for you. The document's guidelines instructed employees to opt for terms like "fairness" and "inclusivity" when describing their work, while acknowledging that "fairness" is a "context-specific term with no singular definition.

Issie Lapowsky issielapowsky is Protocol's chief correspondent, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. She also oversees Protocol's fellowship program. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University's Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing.

At least, don't use the word "bias" or the word "discrimination," or any of those pesky terms that have a funny way of landing companies in court. That's according to an internal document circulated inside Facebook last fall called, "How to talk about fairness.

Do you use terms like algorithmic bias , discrimination , and disparate impact without fully understanding their meaning? If yes, this note is for you," it reads. The note, published in full below, is part of disclosures made to the SEC and provided to Congress in redacted form by whistleblower Frances Haugen's legal counsel. In a statement to Protocol, a spokesperson for Meta, Facebook's new name, said, "In an effort to streamline how our teams approach and discuss topics related to fairness, which is an important component of how we build our products and services, we commonly share resources and guidance, like this note from our Responsible AI team last year, across the company.

The note was posted around the time a reporter for MIT Tech Review was working on an extensive reporting project about the Responsible AI team, with Facebook's cooperation. It was also a little more than a year after Facebook settled a lawsuit with civil rights groups over how its platform enabled advertisers to discriminate in housing, job and financial services ads.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development also filed a similar suit against Facebook just as the first suit was being settled.

Facebook has since faced ongoing accusations of bias and discrimination on the platform, particularly with regard to advertising. Just this week, the company said it would prohibit advertisers from targeting users based on their Facebook engagement with "sensitive" topics, including religion, health, politics and more. It was in this environment that Facebook circulated its "guidelines for communicating about fairness analyses" last November.

Under those guidelines, Facebook employees were instructed to "avoid legal terminology, including specific concepts like discrimination , disparate treatment and disparate impact , and more general terms such as illegal or violates.

These terms, the note's author wrote, "are legal terms with specific meanings and are therefore out of scope for what can be learned through fairness analysis. The guidelines instructed employees instead to opt for terms like "fairness," "inclusivity" and "relevant groups" when describing their work, while acknowledging that "fairness" is a "context-specific term with no singular definition.

Rather than talking about, simply, bias, the guidelines also encouraged Facebook staff to talk about "implementation bias," "model bias" and "label bias," all of which refer to imbalances in how Facebook's AI systems were built, rather than actual discrimination that results from those systems. The document warns employees that they should get legal approval before making "absolute statements regarding the existence of unfairness or bias or discrimination or appropriate measurement or mitigation strategies.

The guidelines illustrate how Facebook has sought to both study and mitigate algorithmic bias, while also avoiding incriminating itself with those findings. They also show how deeply strategic Facebook's decision to talk about these issues was, months before the company ultimately debuted some of its fairness tools in March.

According to other documents in Haugen's disclosures, the guidelines came along at a time when Facebook was trying to reclaim the public narrative about algorithmic bias on the platform. Another internal document, dated just weeks before the guidelines were posted, discusses how Google, Microsoft and Amazon have publicly discussed their own efforts to make their platforms more fair.

In comparison, that document points out, Facebook had "no online presence concerning AI Fairness" at the time. How to Talk About Fairness by Protocol. The second of two leaders from NYU's AI Now Institute, a small but influential organization researching the social implications of artificial intelligence, just joined the Biden administration to lay the groundwork for government AI policy.

Their previous work suggests their presence might encourage the government to require new transparency from tech companies about how their algorithms work. The Federal Trade Commission earlier this month created an entirely new role for AI Now co-founder Meredith Whittaker, who will serve as senior adviser on AI for an agency where tech staff has been in flux despite a mission to get tougher on tech.

AI Now alumna Rashida Richardson — a law professor who served as director of policy research for the group and has a background studying the impact of AI systems like predictive policing tools — joined the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in July as senior policy adviser for data and democracy. Whittaker, who once led product and engineering teams at Google and founded the company's Open Research Group, made headlines in for helping guide worker walkouts and fighting use of Google's AI technology by the Pentagon.

But it's her work at AI Now crafting practical AI policies intended to prevent encoded bias and discrimination against people that is likely to have the most relevance in her new FTC role. Merve Hickok, senior research director of the Center for AI and Digital Policy, a group that evaluates national and international policy work on AI, said the inclusion of Whittaker and Richardson in the administration aligns with the mission of OSTP leaders to clarify the rights and freedoms people should be afforded in relation to data-driven technologies.

AI Now and Whittaker declined to comment for this story, but an AI Now spokesperson said Whittaker will remain involved with the organization. Richardson and the OSTP did not respond to request to comment. As the administration attempts to keep regulatory pace with a rapidly advancing AI tech industry, it's a little too early to know whether Whittaker and Richardson's policy goals will sync with those of their respective agencies.

However, with Whittaker filling an entirely new seat and Richardson working under a director at OSTP whose position has for the first time been elevated to the Cabinet level , their voices could carry.

For one thing, Whittaker's work could bolster the FTC's efforts to intertwine data privacy and antitrust considerations in cases against tech firms. Whittaker has argued that AI advancements have been largely facilitated by a few dominant tech giants that have the resources to suck up massive amounts of data and spin it into algorithmic systems because of ad-driven business models, a common refrain of FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan.

Whittaker told lawmakers at a U. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology hearing in that the massive amounts of data and vast computational resources fueling the AI boom "are assets that only a handful of major tech companies have, and very few others do. Whittaker and Richardson's work at AI Now proposing policies for regulating algorithmic systems — from commercial voice and facial recognition tech to automated Medicaid benefit allocation tools — offers some big clues for what they might want to push at their respective agencies.

In general, they have suggested specific steps they'd like to see implemented by the government that could force more transparency around AI, something many lawmakers demand from big tech firms like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Twitter, as well as smaller companies.

In testimonies given at separate congressional hearings addressing AI, Whittaker and Richardson called for tech firms to waive trade secrecy claims that block government entities and the public from accessing information about their systems. They also wanted lawmakers to require that companies disclose the names and vendors of AI they use to make decisions that affect people.

At the center of the AI Now proposals highlighted by both Whittaker and Richardson is the algorithmic impact assessment , a framework for evaluating the effects of algorithmic and AI systems. It's a concept that has its foundation in more widely used environmental, human rights and privacy impact assessments. The group spotlighted algorithmic impact assessments in comments on "Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century" submitted to the FTC in , noting the evaluation process would "provide essential information for FTC investigations into potential deception, unfair business practices, or other violations of consumer rights.

VanDruff said we may see Whittaker's influence manifest if she weighs in on new or updated FTC rules or in a case against a company. Even before Khan was named chair, the commission had begun taking a more aggressive stance on algorithmic technologies.

In separate cases, it forced photo app Everalbum and Cambridge Analytica to destroy data garnered through allegedly deceptive means as well as the algorithms built from that data. The agency in April reminded observers of its consumer-protection work in the AI arena, including issuing guidance for businesses using automated decision systems to determine credit scoring or home-loan decisions.

Fresh off a blockbuster IPO that saw his expense management company's value soar by a billion dollars, Expensify CEO David Barrett said small businesses are the core focus. Benjamin Pimentel benpimentel covers fintech from San Francisco. He can be reached at bpimentel protocol. For CEO and founder David Barrett, the successful debut capped a hectic week which had him performing a task he hasn't had to do in a long time: wooing investors for the company he founded 13 years ago.

We haven't raised money in like, six years or something. So we don't really talk to new investors, or at least haven't in a very long time. But the novel task gave Barrett an opportunity to explain the company's main focus: the small and medium-sized business market. Investors don't always get it, he said. That's cute and all. But when are you going to start thinking about the real enterprise?

Expensify does offer its expense management tools to big corporations, but the Portland, Oregon-based company sees SMBs as its core market. Barrett explained why in an interview with Protocol. He also talked about Expensify's game plan, his views of the expense management software market and how the company has adapted to the pandemic.

Barrett, who became famous for scathing criticisms of the Trump administration , also shared his views on President Biden's performance. It's pretty hectic basically talking to every hedge fund and investor in the world in the past week or so. We're kind of out of practice, honestly. We don't really raise money. It's been fun to get back out there and talk with people and share the vision and hear people like, "Wow, you guys have been busy. I don't know if there's a particularly hard question to answer after you've answered the same questions 50 times in a row.

Maybe one of the most persistent questions — though we didn't get this as much as I expected — more often than not, people are like, "OK, so you're this payments super app in SMB. What makes Expensify special, fundamentally, is that we have a completely different business model. Everyone else in our industry has a top-down acquisition model. They've got a sales team calling into the CFO or whatever.

And that model works fine, but it only works in a tiny corner of the marketplace and it's the same market that everyone else was going after. Our competition is email and Excel. It's like a manila envelope stuffed full of receipts that is the actual competition.

And no one is defending it. Our competitors use the same business model. You buy a list of CFOs and then you call that list from top to bottom and then you put them through a qualification [process]. They're all calling the same people off the same list with the same message, selling the same product. And, shocker, it's really hard to compete when you're exactly the same as everyone else. Our approach is starting with the employee, and then they pull us into the company.

The bulk of our revenue is subscription revenue that comes from companies between, let's say, 10 and employees.