Word: ibm
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Back in the 1960s, at the same time that the Beatles were wailing about the Taxman ("If you drive a car, I'll tax the street/If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat"), the men at the IRS, in their IBM white shirts and skinny ties, were at the cutting edge of computer technology. The IRS had automated its processing system, eventually gathering everything into 10 service centers, with a computer nucleus in West Virginia. For the first time, taxpayers were required to write their Social Security number on their return. Computers, it seemed, could keep track...
Ironically, the world's last communist power largely relies on the FORTUNE 500 to advance its economic agenda. Whenever Congress considers China's MFN status, such companies as Lockheed Martin, Motorola, Intel, General Motors and IBM lobby on China's side. For Boeing, the stakes could not be higher: Beijing is expected to spend $124 billion on new planes over the next 20 years, making it the world's fastest-growing airline market. "When the U.S.-China relationship goes in the tank, so do our order books," says Boeing spokesman Thomas Tripp...
...immediate jump. And there's no guarantee that the newly added companies will continue to do well or that others on the list won't hit hard times. Prestbo warns, "Moving companies in and out of the Dow is not the same as a buy-sell decision." Consider IBM, which was dropped in 1939 but went on to post 29 stock splits and rise 21,843% before being added back...
...move 16, and Deep Blue is thinking. Or rather, Deep Blue's 512 processors are reviewing 200 million chess positions per second in order to create the illusion that Deep Blue is thinking. And it isn't really Deep Blue either. It's what the guys at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, call Deeper Blue: the second generation of the original Deep Blue, the infamous chess program that one year ago threw a stunning uppercut to human self-esteem by winning the first game of its six-game match against world champion Garry...
Deep Blue didn't flinch. His gambit, Kasparov admits, was "a complete disaster, because the computer simply doesn't care. If the threats are not real, it sees that. So the machine simply took all the pawns and defended its king." And for an industry that IBM had built in the first place, scored the first win over a world champion. "Then I realized," he says, "that this will be tough...