Once upon a time, the epitome of business computing (and all that was wrong with it) was held to be Big Blue - IBM. Apple's very first Macintosh ad, the infamous Chiat/Day Superbowl '1984' ad made by Ridley Scott, was a direct tilt at what Apple felt about IBM: the monolithic corporation that had a monopoly on computing and that failed to see, and cater to, what the people wanted. The promise of the groundbreaking ad was that, thanks to Apple's new Macintosh personal computer (the first of the now 30-year-old line), 1984 need no longer be like the 1984 of in George Orwell's vision. Simplistic, yes. As all socio-political messages need to be. Powerful ... yes.
You see, IBM was the powerhouse of computing worldwide. IBM's systems ran banks, universities - even governments. They were big systems - they needed their own rooms to run in! IBM seemed to be unshakeable, but it had made one very damaging mistake. In 1980, it came up with a viable personal computer concept (and the 'PC' term, actually), but then it let Bill Gates supply the operating system for it (MS-DOS). Bill Gates managed to talk IBM into letting Microsoft retain the rights to MS-DOS, which meant he could market it separate from the IBM PC project - to anyone else who made a PC with similar components, in other words. Perhaps worse, since IBM's first real mass-produced personal computer was built from off-the-shelf parts ('open architecture') and marketed by outside distributors (initially, by Sears & Roebucks and Computerland), pretty much anyone could build it. Which of course, many companies went on to do. Therefore, in some kind of lapse of vision or judgment, IBM invented a new chariot, then handed the reins for it to all and sundry.
Cue IBM losing out big time to have its brand on most PCs as people rapidly took them up.
This should have crushed IBM utterly, but somehow management had the wherewithal, after mass layoffs and hardships, to stay in the game. Strangely, IBM even went on to have a hand in the 6800-series CPUs that went into the PowerPC CPUs of the Macs of the 1990s, in a co-manufacturing deal with Apple and Motorola. Of course, eventually Apple went to the Intel CPU while, perhaps even more strangely, Microsoft chose the PowerPC architecture for Xbox at around the same time.
In the meantime, IBM has been plugging away in the supercomputer and research space, and has managed to stay a big player in world computing in a good lesson to any corporate out there.
