IBM and Competitors

Executive Summary

International Business Machines (IBM), founded in the United States of America is regarded as a pioneer in the Information Technology (IT) industry. The company was founded in 1911 as Computing Tabulating Recording Company which continued to evolve over few years, adding to its product lines until in 1914, Thomas J. Watson Sr. became the General Manager. After eleven months of his joining C-T-R, he became the president of the firm. The culture developed by Watson laid the roots of the long-lasting success face by IBM. He inculcated the THINK mantra into the corporate culture of IBM.

Initially the focus was on the business tabulating solution. Within the reign of Watson, revenues doubled within the four years and the company was expanded into Europe, Australia, Asia and South America. CTR was renamed as International Business Machines (IBM) in the year 1924.

Until the last decade, it functioned as one of the most profitable business; constantly involved in mergers and acquisitions along the way. Now, the personal computer segment has lost its significance and appeal to the market, main reason of which is the reduced level of innovativeness now offered by IBM. As the competition is rising, consumer market is moving towards cost effective options thus ruling out IBM. To backtrack, various analysis has been undertaken and implications and action plans are discussed.

To rectify, compliance to the stakeholder's objective is important. Risk-taking should be inculcated within the employees to induce innovative ideas but before these ideas are interwoven into strategies, it should be well researched so as to determine feasibility.

Key Takeaways

Fitness landscape determined that it is the diversity in product offering that provide business with greater likelihood to survive rather than the customer base or any other factor. Organizational decay can best be guarded by inducing diversity in any business. Boid Analysis provided the idea that rather than having broader customer base or serving niche market, it is better to divide the potential customers; for newly developed organization, or divide the organization's customer base according to their actual expectations; which can be gauged out of feedback, suggestions and continuous interaction. This would help IBM not to compromise on the expectations of the customer base they can easily fulfill; fro they will be confident that customers appreciate their product. This would rule out unnecessarily introducing innovations that would end up increasing the costs whilst not appealing to customer expectations as well. So it has been implied by the analysis that rather than to incur cost excessively on vague ideas and subsequently hoping that it might work; it is better to come up with a significant idea, one of which IBM should be sure that it would strike the customer with awe, and implement that.

The key point determine from Industry Evolution Modeling Analysis is that innovation clock speed of the Information Technology sector is high across all the industries and that for it to be managed and for firms to pace along, continuous improvements in the products are ...