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How IBM Survived the Mainframe Apocalypse
In the late 1980s, IBM was the most valuable company on earth — worth more than the entire computing industry combined. By 1993, it was bleeding money, facing a hostile breakup by shareholders, and written off as a dinosaur. This episode drills into the specific numbers and decisions that turned it around: Lou Gerstner's iconic 'no breakup' strategy in 1993, the $3.5 billion bet on services over hardware, and the pivot to open-source Linux in 2000 that saved the company's software business. We also look at a modern echo: how in 2025, IBM is betting on quantum computing and…
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