Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

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Wow, your choices are interesting.

  * Exxon: Massive amounts of technology have been ingested by the oil majors in the last 50 years.  It is basically a high tech business at this point.  Also, if we only focus on the physical work, fracking didn't exist 50 years ago, and now it is a major part of the industry.  Again: Huge changes.

  * Coke/Hershey: Think about how much automation exists in their manuf.  Do any humans touch a "bottle" of Coca Cola before it is packaged?  I doubt it in highly developed countries.

  * Wells Fargo: the same as Exxon.  Commercial banking has a fraction the number of employees _in proportion to their assets under management (AUM)_ compared to 50 years ago.  How/Why?  Automation / computers!

Their point wasn’t that innovation doesn’t exist. Obviously things change. Still, both Exonn, Coke and Wells Fargo are still fundamentally in the same business as they were before. That’s not the case of other companies. IBM became big selling punch-card tabulating system. Have you seen a punch card recently?

Ibm was not in the punch card machine making business. It was in the data processing business, and still is.

> Ibm was not in the punch card machine making business. It was in the data processing business, and still is.

IBM absolutely was in the punch card machine making business in that they were absolutely selling punch card machines and not data processing consulting. And no, they are not in the data processing business today. They are clearly a consulting company first with some software development bolted.

They actually pivoted twice from a mostly hardware company to a mostly software one and once again to a mostly service based one.

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