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Informationen zum Autor James W. Cortada is Senior Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota and the author of Information and the Modern Corporation (MIT Press) and other books. He worked at IBM for thirty-eight years in sales, consulting, managerial, and research positions. Klappentext This is a history of IBM, a huge multinational firm, from its origins in the 1880s to the present. It demonstrates that this supplier of computers, software and information technology services played a profound role in shaping how other large organizations and economies evolved in the twentieth century. It describes its strategies, expansions, how various parts of the company collaborated and competed within the firm overcoming problems, a nearly fatal period in the early 1990s, and its recurring revivals and successes. The book is unique for several reasons. First, it is a comprehensive volume covering technologies, managerial actions, strategies, sales, the role of customers, and government regulatory and legal issues. Second, it is the only history that covers the post 1980 period down to 2018. (The last major history of IBM was published in the early 1990s.) Third, its emphasis on the role of corporate and sales culture is unique among books concerning IBM. Fourth, this book provides the greatest amount of detail available today about IBM's role in Western and Eastern Europe. The book is also unique because the author brings to the project several perspectives: that of an employee close to much of the critical events of one-third of the company's history, that of a trained historian, and that of an experienced student of the history of computing in business. Thus, he is able to integrate the entire history of the company from its origins to the present, demonstrating, for example, legacies of a prior era still evident in today's company, an ability to connect IBM's behaviors in each decade to those of other large multinational corporations, and to the computing activities of its many thousands of customers-- Zusammenfassung A history of one of the most influential American companies of the last century. For decades, IBM shaped the way the world did business. IBM products were in every large organization, and IBM corporate culture established a management style that was imitated by companies around the globe. It was “Big Blue, ” an icon. And yet over the years, IBM has gone through both failure and success, surviving flatlining revenue and forced reinvention. The company almost went out of business in the early 1990s, then came back strong with new business strategies and an emphasis on artificial intelligence. In this authoritative, monumental history, James Cortada tells the story of one of the most influential American companies of the last century. Cortada, a historian who worked at IBM for many years, describes IBM's technology breakthroughs, including the development of the punch card (used for automatic tabulation in the 1890 census), the calculation and printing of the first Social Security checks in the 1930s, the introduction of the PC to a mass audience in the 1980s, and the company's shift in focus from hardware to software. He discusses IBM's business culture and its orientation toward employees and customers; its global expansion; regulatory and legal issues, including antitrust litigation; and the track records of its CEOs. The secret to IBM's unequalled longevity in the information technology market, Cortada shows, is its capacity to adapt to changing circumstances and technologies. Inhaltsverzeichnis Preface ix I From Birth to Identity: IBM in its Early Years, 1880s-1945 1 1 Origins, 1880s-1914 3 2 Thomas J. Watson Sr. and the Creation of IBM, 1914-1924 27 3 The Emergence of IBM and the Culture of THINK 61 4 IBM and the Great Depression 91 5 IBM in World War II, 1939-1945 121 II IBM the Computer Behemot...
