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From: philh@comuno.freeserve.co.uk (phil hunt)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,sci.crypt,talk.politics.crypto
Subject: Re: On RC4 in C
Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2001 00:29:56 +0000
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Date: 2001-02-28T02:23:34+00:00
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On Tue, 27 Feb 2001 22:57:28 GMT, William Hugh Murray <whmurray@optonline.net> wrote:
>
>Perhaps.  I would argue that IBM's change of fortune was rooted in
>
>* failure to recognize the reasons for the success of hardware competition from
>Digital, Apple, Prime, and Compaq
>* investing where its revenues were at the expense of investing where its growth
>was (mainframes v.  small systems)
>* continuing to sell at the top as the scale of computers changed and decision
>making moved down in the enterprise
>* selling exclusively to the enterprise and ignoring the consumer
>* investing in OS/2 at the expense of Windows, SNA/SDLC and ISO/OSI at the
>expense of TCP/IP, token-ring at the expense of
>    ethernet, host-guest at the expense of client-server, etc.
>* investing  in closed/proprietary  systems (e.g., AS/400) at the expense of
>open/industry-standard systems (e.g., Unix)

I'd say the proximate cause of IBM's downfall in the 80s and early
nineties was the decision to go over to PS/2 and OS/2, which were
market failures and resulted in IBM losing control of the
microcomputer market.

In more general terms, they lost because other suppliers were undercutting
them with cheaper computers. For reasons why this situation is, in 
general, hard to counter, read _The Innovator's Dilemma_ especially the
chapter "What goes up can't come down".


-- 
*****[ Phil Hunt ***** philh@comuno.freeserve.co.uk ]*****
"Mommy, make the nasty penguin go away." -- Jim Allchin, MS head 
of OS development, regarding open source software (paraphrased).