Lou Gerstner has shuffled off this mortal coil. "The CEO misread consumer and business enthusiasm for PCs, allowing Compaq and Dell to overtake the market it pioneered, and Microsoft to dominate the market for PC operating systems to the extent that IBM gave up on OS/2. . . . IBM also lost leadership in networking, storage, processor design, and saw x86 servers drive its mainframe and midrange business into niche markets." But other than that . . .
https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/29/lou_gerstner/
dep Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/
On Sun December 28 2025 23:18:20 dep via tde-users wrote:
Lou Gerstner has shuffled off this mortal coil. "The CEO misread consumer and business enthusiasm for PCs, allowing Compaq and Dell to overtake the market it pioneered, and Microsoft to dominate the market for PC operating systems to the extent that IBM gave up on OS/2. . . . IBM also lost leadership in networking, storage, processor design, and saw x86 servers drive its mainframe and midrange business into niche markets." But other than that . . .
I think The Register is being a little unfair. Akers had already crippled IBM before Gerstner took over in '93. And Akers problem was that he had done nothing to change IBM as the world changed.
said Mike Bird via tde-users:
| I think The Register is being a little unfair. Akers had already | crippled IBM before Gerstner took over in '93. And Akers problem | was that he had done nothing to change IBM as the world changed.
You have a point, but Gerstner took IBM out of the PC business and had it stop doing many interesting things. I'm not sure that he was at all interested in IBM's products, any more than he was especially interested in cigarettes or cookies or travelers cheques.
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Mike Bird