IBM is a big company, obviously. The negative side of that breadth for IBM is the perception (held by some) that it is a big (tough to manoeuvre) ship with so much tradition and history that it might be set in its ways. The positive side of that breadth is that the firm can spend a lot of time developing potentially world-changing (in some cases actually life-saving) innovations in its IBM Research department, some of which may not even appear to be directly initially computing related.
If its ‘paradigm shifting’ creations and inventions actually do help create new global processes in areas like human water supply, quantum computing and blockchain (to name three), then these elements of the new IBM could arguably serve to counter the notion of the old IBM. This is not the official IBM go-to-market strategy by any means, but there may be some subliminal acknowledgement of this somewhere inside the firm’s upper bastions.
So where does that contextualization get us? Well, this is the age of so-called ‘digital transformation’, remember?
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