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Comment by kingsuper20 | Hacker News Reader

>Back in the Thinkpad era, IBM had a lot of cool stuff going on. But now it seems like a shadow.

I remember their stuff from the pre-Thinkpad era. Quite a company. Working for both a large competitor and for a small company that was trying to sell to them they seemed clumsy but still had an amazing portfolio.

My guess is that they just need to merge/break-up/reconfigure into oblivion. Just another AT&T/HP/ITT/Polaroid/Xerox

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Having worked at one of those that also did business with IBM, I felt there was an ethos I observed in the upper ranks that is hard to describe. It was like they felt they were better than others, had large egos about their brand and had a certain stuffiness to them where they knew what was right because it was them. Like a business book/MBA club of sorts. Kinda hard to describe it.

Anyhow I wonder if this better-than-thou, stuffy corporate attitude leads itself to internal re-org cycles where it results in no identity and no central vision, just internal battles.

It seems like other similar size large companies, like Apple, can be successful so maybe their leadership doesn't show these character traits?

When I had to deal with some small tendril of IBM, I think the anti-trust suit was still in the works. It probably scarred their dealings with other companies to the same degree that their dominance did.

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