Word: ibm
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Traumatic as the cutbacks are to the giant firm's employees, they underwhelmed Wall Street analysts. Many think IBM has yet to bite the final bullet, and must pare its costs and payrolls further. (See related stories beginning on page...
...bigger they come, the harder they fall. Such corporate Goliaths as IBM and General Motors once dominated American industry. Now they hemorrhage billions of dollars in a single year. What happened? Like the dinosaurs that once roamed the earth, they failed to keep up with the times. "Nothing is forever," says Louis Lataif, dean of the Boston University School of Management. "None of us today could name the 50 largest companies in America in 1900, but everyone alive at the time thought they would all go on forever...
...turmoil that grips GM, IBM and other behemoths including Sears and American Express, is more than a matter of size and the inevitable cycles of change. Many giants manage to avoid hardening of the arteries. Du Pont, which is nearly 200 years old, remains an industry leader in synthetic materials. Philip Morris started as a tobacco shop in 1847 but is now a $55 billion-a- year company that sells everything from beer to breakfast cereal. General Electric managed to grow from light bulbs to jet engines, and Motorola from car radios to microchips...
When it comes to dominating an industry, few companies have done so with the overpowering force of International Business Machines. From gigantic mainframes and tiny laptops to semiconductors and software, IBM ruthlessly called the shots for the entire industry after the computer became a commercial item about 40 years ago. So tight was IBM's market grip that it was practically impossible for any computer company to do business without being tied in some way to the Big Blue colossus...
...powerful as yesterday's closetfuls. Its lead in personal computers has evaporated. Its supremacy in computer chips is a mere memory. In software, upstart companies that didn't exist a little more than a decade ago are running rings around the 78-year-old behemoth. And even worse, IBM has been bogged down by endless rounds of painful restructurings and cutbacks. "IBM is no longer the monolithic monster that strikes fear in the hearts of competitors," says Ulric Weil, a leading computer consultant. "It has proved to be quite mortal after...