IBM and Computing: The Story of the Iconic Company Amid Technological Progress from the Abacus to AI - Paperback

by William C. Shaffer (Author)

Computing's early focus on speed for scientific calculations gave way to commercial applications, playing to the strengths of the small company that would become IBM. With a focus on technology, marketing, and perhaps a dash of monopoly, IBM climbed to market dominance and widespread admiration.

Spurred by ambitions to grow even larger, IBM's fortunes faltered. Lou Gerstner, an outsider and the former "Cookie Man" CEO of RJR Nabisco, pulled the company back from catastrophe. Unfortunately, his successors embraced financial schemes, ignoring the fundamental imperative of innovation. The pace of technology is unforgiving, and even a dominant company as IBM would soon discover this. The author pulls no punches in describing the company's fall from iconic to troubled.

The author, a long-time IBMer with a decorated technical background, provides deft storytelling with well-drawn portraits of the people and ideas that propelled computing forward. He deciphers the inner workings and import of each technology transformation. He also delivers a firsthand chronicle of IBM's lesser-known but very successful midrange and personal computers. The book is a compelling story of how IBM and computing transformed the world. Today, a decidedly smaller IBM struggles to regain relevance, let alone its former dominance. With AI and quantum computers poised to dramatically reshape the computing world, will IBM be part of the continuing story?

How does the book differ from the many existing books on IBM:

• > It tells the extraordinary story of IBM but within the context of the relentless forward march of computing technology beginning thousands of years ago with the abacus.
• > The reader will come away with a greater understanding of the technologies and strategies that were critical to the company's success.
• > It is an insider's account, with academic quality research and rigor, working with the cooperation of IBM. The central focus remains on IBM, a company so iconic in the 20th Century and so troubled in the 21st.
• > Where most IBM books treat the company as big mainframe computers and little else, the author reveals the lesser-known story of the smaller IBM, an upstart division with personal and midrange computers that grew into a $14 billion business.

Most importantly, the story pulls no punches. The author chronicles the failed financial strategies and missed technology waves that were the company's undoing.