Word: ibm
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...could it happen? After all, the millions of Americans who have bought IBM stock or joined the company as employees were betting on a leviathan, a creature so big it couldn't be threatened. The answer is that while no killer shark is out there attacking this whale, thousands of relentless barracuda are taking bites out of it. Once the pre-eminent force in closet-size mainframe computers, IBM has watched its share of the world market dwindle from nearly 80% to 69%, as rivals like Japan's Fujitsu and Germany's Siemens score large gains with more powerful...
...IBM has even lost favor with investors, who are still reeling from the company's first quarterly loss ever. True, the figure was mainly an accounting phenomenon, but its cause was far from heartening: The company was taking a $2.3 billion charge for the full estimated costs of paying 10,000 employees to quit voluntarily in the coming year. At its annual meeting last month, chairman John Akers told stockholders to brace for more bad news: "While we'd like to believe economic recovery is just around the corner, we have seen no evidence yet to indicate any improvement...
Utter dominion over an industry, which IBM enjoyed from the 1960s to the 1980s, rarely lasts so long. Now that it is waning, perhaps the company should be congratulated for maintaining its role as long as it did rather than criticized for letting it finally diminish. And before anyone organizes a benefit dinner, remember that IBM was America's most profitable industrial company last year, earning more than $6 billion. Its profit will likely decline this year, but the company remains huge, powerful and full of talent. In the realm of computers, it is not what it was. But underestimating...
...most powerful person in the computer industry? Arguably it is the frail, bespectacled, boyish figure shown below, the essential computer nerd, William Gates, 35. His Microsoft Corp., which he co-founded two years after dropping out of Harvard, is to computer software what IBM is to hardware -- and now the two companies, formerly partners, are contenders in one of the industry's most important battles...
...Like IBM, Microsoft dwarfs its competitors. With $1.5 billion in sales and a market value of $12 billion, it is eight times larger than its nearest rival, Lotus Development. Gates is the world's youngest self-made billionaire, with 42 million shares of Microsoft stock worth about $4.3 billion. The company didn't get so big so fast all alone: its close tie to Big Blue propelled it to the top. A decade ago, the two companies teamed up to develop the IBM PC, with Microsoft contributing the disk operating system, or DOS. After the PC started to lose steam...