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IBM was the Google or Microsoft of the 80s. Like HP, in realigning the company to survive they destroyed what made them great. I worked with many smart IBM folks… without exception they were laid off or driven out to meet some random metric.

The Red Hat acquisition and spin out of the services garbage might make them more relevant again.

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IBM was the entire IT industry of 1950s, 1960s, and most of 1970s. It is hard to explain IBM's dominance in today's terms. IBM used to be so dominant that the entire financial industry could not operate without their IBM mainframes and today major banks still run on IBM.

The downside (to IBM) was that Wall Street decided "never again" and fought hard to prevent another company of IBM's scale from reappearing.

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