Nobody Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM

There used to be a time when an IT leader could sign one purchasing and support contract with a single vendor, and have all the computing hardware and software needed to conduct enterprise computing for the foreseeable future.

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" was regarded as an axiom, and IT purchasers could get everything from mainframes, rack servers, thinkpads, and thinkcentres for corporate desktop needs, and everything in between.

It was an era where it made sense for those supplying computer equipment to integrate and upsell customers on as many products as they could manage.

Thus, we ended up in a place where it was conceivable, and often the reality, that a single IT vendor would not only sell hardware for datacentre, desktop, and laptop computers, but also have its own matching portfolio of software that included mail servers, office programs, communications software, and even operating systems and programming languages.

Enterprise computing was at the forefront of innovation, and it consequently set the tone for how the industry was viewed.

Then, as we all know, consumersation changed the way that computing was approached, and it turned out that those highly integrated corporate vendors that ponderously upgraded their hardware fleets at times of their own choosing were far from the be-all and end-all that customers wanted, or, more importantly, desired.

New brands with shiny hardware appeared on enterprise desktops, and, in parallel, open-source software and internet services were pushing aside the proprietary and expensive software that increasingly lacked features that users found outside of the workplace. Why wrestle with software like Lotus Notes and its associated baggage for email and calendaring when using a service such as Gmail was easy by comparison?

As the computing world shifted and left behind its old masters, those integrated multinationals found themselves increasingly irrelevant, and took to buying companies that offered a chance to reinvigorate and remake the parent corporation — but the theory rarely matched the reality, and often new and exciting companies became crushed with the weight of the parent corporation and its culture.