Misplaced Pages

#52947

69-410: Brooks's observations are based on his experiences at IBM while managing the development of OS/360 . He had added more programmers to a project falling behind schedule, a decision that he would later conclude had, counter-intuitively, delayed the project even further. He also made the mistake of asserting that one project—involved in writing an ALGOL compiler —would require six months, regardless of

138-575: A neuromorphic CMOS integrated circuit and announced a $ 3 billion investment over the following five years to design a neural chip that mimics the human brain, with 10 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses, but that uses just 1 kilowatt of power. In 2016, the company launched all-flash arrays designed for small and midsized companies, which includes software for data compression, provisioning, and snapshots across various systems. In January 2019, IBM introduced its first commercial quantum computer: IBM Q System One . In March 2020, it

207-456: A "good" programmer develop critical system components while the rest of a team provides what is needed at the right time. Additionally, Brooks muses that "good" programmers are generally five to ten times as productive as mediocre ones. Software is invisible. Therefore, many things only become apparent once a certain amount of work has been done on a new system, allowing a user to experience it. This experience will yield insights, which will change

276-649: A Hollerith department called Hollerith Abteilung, which had IBM machines, including calculating and sorting machines. IBM as a military contractor produced 6% of the M1 Carbine rifles used in World War II, about 346,500 of them, between August 1943 and May. IBM built the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator , an electromechanical computer, during World War II. It offered its first commercial stored-program computer,

345-581: A consequence, IBM quickly began losing its market dominance to emerging competitors in the PC market. In 1985, IBM collaborated with Microsoft to develop a new operating system , which was released as OS/2 . Following a dispute, Microsoft severed the collaboration and IBM continued development of OS/2 on its own but it failed in the marketplace against Microsoft's Windows during the mid-1990s. In 1991 IBM began spinning off its many divisions into autonomous subsidiaries (so-called "Baby Blues") in an attempt to make

414-677: A fifth company, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) based in Endicott, New York. The five companies had 1,300 employees and offices and plants in Endicott and Binghamton , New York; Dayton, Ohio ; Detroit, Michigan ; Washington, D.C. ; and Toronto , Canada. Collectively, the companies manufactured a wide array of machinery for sale and lease, ranging from commercial scales and industrial time recorders, meat and cheese slicers, to tabulators and punched cards. Thomas J. Watson, Sr. , fired from

483-447: A focus on customer service, an insistence on well-groomed, dark-suited salesmen and had an evangelical fervor for instilling company pride and loyalty in every worker". His favorite slogan, " THINK ", became a mantra for each company's employees. During Watson's first four years, revenues reached $ 9 million ($ 158 million today) and the company's operations expanded to Europe, South America, Asia and Australia. Watson never liked

552-419: A personal device. This is in contrast to SaaS , where users buy a subscription and where the software is centrally hosted. One example of software as a product has historically been Microsoft Office , which has traditionally been distributed as a file package using CD-ROM or other physical media or is downloaded over network. Office 365 , on the other hand, is an example of SaaS , where a monthly subscription

621-424: A reprint of the essay " No Silver Bullet " with commentary by the author. Brooks discusses several causes of scheduling failures. The most enduring is his discussion of Brooks's law : Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later . Man-month is a hypothetical unit of work representing the work done by one person in one month; Brooks's law says that the possibility of measuring useful work in man-months

690-406: A second system, an engineer should be mindful that they are susceptible to over-engineering it. The author makes the observation that in a suitably complex system there is a certain irreducible number of errors. Any attempt to fix observed errors tends to result in the introduction of other errors. Brooks wrote "Question: How does a large software project get to be one year late? Answer: One day at

759-626: A separate lawsuit. In 2015, IBM bought the digital part of The Weather Company , Truven Health Analytics for $ 2.6 billion in 2016, and in October 2018, IBM announced its intention to acquire Red Hat for $ 34 billion, which was completed on July 9, 2019. In February 2020, IBM's John Kelly III joined Brad Smith of Microsoft to sign a pledge with the Vatican to ensure the ethical use and practice of Artificial Intelligence (AI) . IBM announced in October 2020 that it would divest

SECTION 10

#1732779523053

828-480: A sharp drop in profit margins during the second quarter of fiscal year 1992; market analysts attributed the drop to a fierce price war in the personal computer market over the summer of 1992. The corporate restructuring was one of the largest and most expensive in history up to that point. By the summer of 1993, the IBM PC Co. had divided into multiple business units itself, including Ambra Computer Corporation and

897-423: A time!" Incremental slippages on many fronts eventually accumulate to produce a large overall delay. Continued attention to meeting small individual milestones is required at each level of management. To make a user-friendly system, the system must have conceptual integrity, which can only be achieved by separating architecture from implementation. A single chief architect (or a small number of architects), acting on

966-400: A user's needs or the perception of the user's needs. The system should, therefore, be changed to fulfill the changed requirements of the user. This can only occur up to a certain point, otherwise the system may never be completed. At a certain date, no more changes should be allowed to the system and the code should be frozen. All requests for changes should be delayed until the next version of

1035-414: Is a myth, and is hence the centerpiece of the book. Complex programming projects cannot be perfectly partitioned into discrete tasks that can be worked on without communication between the workers and without establishing a set of complex interrelationships between tasks and the workers performing them. Therefore, assigning more programmers to a project running behind schedule will make it even later. This

1104-570: Is because the time required for the new programmers to learn about the project and the increased communication overhead will consume an ever-increasing quantity of the calendar time available. When n people have to communicate among themselves, as n increases, their output decreases and when it becomes negative the project is delayed further with every person added. Brooks added the chapter "No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accidents in Software Engineering" and further reflections on it in

1173-399: Is capable of. The point being, if a system is too complicated to use, many features will go unused because no one has time to learn them. The chief architect produces a manual of system specifications. It should describe the external specifications of the system in detail, that is everything that the user sees. The manual should be altered as feedback comes in from the implementation teams and

1242-440: Is the largest shareholder of IBM and as of March 31, 2023, held 15.7% of total shares outstanding. In 2011, IBM became the first technology company Warren Buffett 's holding company Berkshire Hathaway invested in. Initially he bought 64 million shares costing $ 10.5 billion. Over the years, Buffett increased his IBM holdings, but by the end of 2017 had reduced them by 94.5% to 2.05 million shares; by May 2018, he

1311-574: The FORTRAN scientific programming language was developed. In 1961, IBM developed the SABRE reservation system for American Airlines and introduced the highly successful Selectric typewriter. In 1963, IBM employees and computers helped NASA track the orbital flights of the Mercury astronauts. A year later, it moved its corporate headquarters from New York City to Armonk, New York. The latter half of

1380-851: The IBM Rome Software Lab (Rome, Italy), Hursley House (Winchester, UK), 330 North Wabash (Chicago, Illinois, United States), the Cambridge Scientific Center (Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States), the IBM Toronto Software Lab (Toronto, Canada), the IBM Building, Johannesburg (Johannesburg, South Africa), the IBM Building (Seattle) (Seattle, Washington, United States), the IBM Hakozaki Facility (Tokyo, Japan),

1449-888: The IBM Yamato Facility (Yamato, Japan), the IBM Canada Head Office Building (Ontario, Canada) and the Watson IoT Headquarters (Munich, Germany). Defunct IBM campuses include the IBM Somers Office Complex (Somers, New York), Spango Valley (Greenock, Scotland), and Tour Descartes (Paris, France). The company's contributions to industrial architecture and design include works by Marcel Breuer , Eero Saarinen , Ludwig Mies van der Rohe , I.M. Pei and Ricardo Legorreta . Van der Rohe's building in Chicago

SECTION 20

#1732779523053

1518-544: The National Cash Register Company by John Henry Patterson , called on Flint and, in 1914, was offered a position at CTR. Watson joined CTR as general manager and then, 11 months later, was made President when antitrust cases relating to his time at NCR were resolved. Having learned Patterson's pioneering business practices, Watson proceeded to put the stamp of NCR onto CTR's companies. He implemented sales conventions, "generous sales incentives,

1587-681: The Universal Product Code . IBM and the World Bank first introduced financial swaps to the public in 1981, when they entered into a swap agreement. IBM entered the microcomputer market in the 1980s with the IBM Personal Computer (IBM 5150), which soon became known as the PC , one of IBM's best selling products. Due to a lack of foresight by IBM, the PC was not well protected by intellectual property laws. As

1656-410: The magnetic stripe card that would become ubiquitous for credit/debit/ATM cards, driver's licenses, rapid transit cards and a multitude of other identity and access control applications. IBM pioneered the manufacture of these cards, and for most of the 1970s, the data processing systems and software for such applications ran exclusively on IBM computers. In 1974, IBM engineer George J. Laurer developed

1725-541: The trademark IBM ), nicknamed Big Blue , is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York and present in over 175 countries. It is a publicly traded company and one of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average . IBM is the largest industrial research organization in the world, with 19 research facilities across a dozen countries, having held

1794-531: The 1960s and 1970s, the IBM mainframe , exemplified by the System/360 , was the world's dominant computing platform , with the company producing 80 percent of computers in the U.S. and 70 percent of computers worldwide. IBM debuted in the microcomputer market in 1981 with the IBM Personal Computer , — its DOS software provided by Microsoft , — which became the basis for the majority of personal computers to

1863-577: The 1960s saw IBM continue its support of space exploration, participating in the 1965 Gemini flights, 1966 Saturn flights, and 1969 lunar mission. IBM also developed and manufactured the Saturn V's Instrument Unit and Apollo spacecraft guidance computers. On April 7, 1964, IBM launched the first computer system family, the IBM System/360 . It spanned the complete range of commercial and scientific applications from large to small, allowing companies for

1932-865: The 21st century. As one of the world's oldest and largest technology companies, IBM has been responsible for several technological innovations , including the automated teller machine (ATM), dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), the floppy disk , the hard disk drive , the magnetic stripe card , the relational database , the SQL programming language , and the UPC barcode . The company has made inroads in advanced computer chips , quantum computing , artificial intelligence , and data infrastructure . IBM employees and alumni have won various recognitions for their scientific research and inventions, including six Nobel Prizes and six Turing Awards . IBM originated with several technological innovations developed and commercialized in

2001-490: The IBM PC Co. was dissolved and merged into IBM Personal Systems Group. In 2002 IBM acquired PwC Consulting, the consulting arm of PwC which was merged into its IBM Global Services . On September 14, 2004, LG and IBM announced that their business alliance in the South Korean market would end at the end of that year. Both companies stated that it was unrelated to the charges of bribery earlier that year. Xnote

2070-561: The IBM Power Personal Systems Group, the former an attempt to design and market " clone " computers of IBM's own architecture and the latter responsible for IBM's PowerPC -based workstations . IBM PC Co. introduced the ThinkPad clone computers, which IBM would heavily market and would eventually become one of the best-selling series of notebook computers . In 1993, IBM posted an $ 8 billion loss – at

2139-789: The IBM website. On June 7, Krishna announced that IBM would carry out an "orderly wind-down" of its operations in Russia. In late 2022, IBM started a collaboration with new Japanese manufacturer Rapidus , which led GlobalFoundries to file a lawsuit against IBM the following year. In 2023, IBM acquired Manta Software Inc. to complement its data and A.I. governance capabilities for an undisclosed amount. On November 16, 2023, IBM suspended ads on Twitter after ads were found next to pro-Nazi content. In December 2023, IBM announced it would acquire Software AG 's StreamSets and webMethods platforms for €2.13 billion ($ 2.33 billion). IBM's market capitalization

The Mythical Man-Month - Misplaced Pages Continue

2208-551: The Managed Infrastructure Services unit of its Global Technology Services division into a new public company. The new company, Kyndryl , will have 90,000 employees, 4,600 clients in 115 countries, with a backlog of $ 60 billion. IBM's spin off was greater than any of its previous divestitures, and welcomed by investors. IBM appointed Martin Schroeter, who had been IBM's CFO from 2014 through

2277-516: The Weather Channel mobile app. Also that year, IBM employees created the film A Boy and His Atom , which was the first molecule movie to tell a story. In 2016, IBM acquired video conferencing service Ustream and formed a new cloud video unit. In April 2016, it posted a 14-year low in quarterly sales. The following month, Groupon sued IBM accusing it of patent infringement, two months after IBM accused Groupon of patent infringement in

2346-469: The antitrust laws in IBM's actions directed against leasing companies and plug-compatible peripheral manufacturers. Shortly after, IBM unbundled its software and services in what many observers believed was a direct result of the lawsuit, creating a competitive market for software. In 1982, the Department of Justice dropped the case as "without merit". Also in 1969, IBM engineer Forrest Parry invented

2415-458: The architect(s) to clarify their intent on a feature they are implementing, before proceeding with an assumption that might very well be completely incorrect. The architect(s) are responsible for formulating a group picture of the project and communicating it to others. Much as a surgical team during surgery is led by one surgeon performing the most critical work, while directing the team to assist with less critical parts, it seems reasonable to have

2484-480: The chapter "'No Silver Bullet' Refired" to the anniversary edition of The Mythical Man-Month . Brooks insists that there is no one silver bullet : "there is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude [tenfold] improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity." The argument relies on the distinction between accidental complexity and essential complexity, similar to

2553-601: The city's seventh tallest building and overlooking Beijing National Stadium ("Bird's Nest") , home to the 2008 Summer Olympics . IBM India Private Limited is the Indian subsidiary of IBM, which is headquartered at Bangalore , Karnataka. It has facilities in Coimbatore , Chennai , Kochi , Ahmedabad , Delhi , Kolkata , Mumbai , Pune , Gurugram , Noida , Bhubaneshwar , Surat , Visakhapatnam , Hyderabad , Bangalore and Jamshedpur . Other notable buildings include

2622-560: The clumsy hyphenated name "Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company" and chose to replace it with the more expansive title "International Business Machines" which had previously been used as the name of CTR's Canadian Division; the name was changed on February 14, 1924. By 1933, most of the subsidiaries had been merged into one company, IBM. The Nazis made extensive use of Hollerith punch card and alphabetical accounting equipment and IBM's majority-owned German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH ( Dehomag ), supplied this equipment from

2691-461: The company designed a video surveillance system for Davao City . In 2014 IBM announced it would sell its x86 server division to Lenovo for $ 2.1 billion. while continuing to offer Power ISA -based servers. Also that year, IBM began announcing several major partnerships with other companies, including Apple Inc. , Twitter, Facebook, Tencent , Cisco , UnderArmour , Box , Microsoft , VMware , CSC , Macy's , Sesame Workshop ,

2760-421: The company more manageable and to streamline IBM by having other investors finance those companies. These included AdStar , dedicated to disk drives and other data storage products; IBM Application Business Systems, dedicated to mid-range computers; IBM Enterprise Systems, dedicated to mainframes; Pennant Systems, dedicated to mid-range and large printers; Lexmark , dedicated to small printers; and more. Lexmark

2829-475: The early 1930s. This equipment was critical to Nazi efforts to categorize citizens of both Germany and other nations that fell under Nazi control through ongoing censuses. These census data were used to facilitate the round-up of Jews and other targeted groups, and to catalog their movements through the machinery of the Holocaust , including internment in the concentration camps. Nazi concentration camps operated

The Mythical Man-Month - Misplaced Pages Continue

2898-553: The end of 2017, as CEO of Kyndryl. In 2021, IBM announced the acquisition of the enterprise software company Turbonomic for $ 1.5 billion. In January 2022, IBM announced it would sell Watson Health to private equity firm Francisco Partners . On March 7, 2022, a few days after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine , IBM CEO Arvind Krishna published a Ukrainian flag and announced that "we have suspended all business in Russia". All Russian articles were also removed from

2967-445: The enterprise-oriented Personal Systems Group of the IBM PC Co. into IBM's own Global Services personal computer consulting and customer service division. The resulting merged business units then became known simply as IBM Personal Systems Group. A year later, IBM stopped selling their computers at retail outlets after their market share in this sector had fallen considerably behind competitors Compaq and Dell . Immediately afterwards,

3036-492: The first time to upgrade to models with greater computing capability without having to rewrite their applications. It was followed by the IBM System/370 in 1970. Together the 360 and 370 made the IBM mainframe the dominant mainframe computer and the dominant computing platform in the industry throughout this period and into the early 1980s. They and the operating systems that ran on them such as OS/VS1 and MVS , and

3105-749: The larger ones. In New York City, IBM has several offices besides CHQ, including the IBM Watson headquarters at Astor Place in Manhattan. Outside of New York, major campuses in the United States include Austin, Texas ; Research Triangle Park (Raleigh-Durham), North Carolina ; Rochester, Minnesota ; and Silicon Valley, California . IBM's real estate holdings are varied and globally diverse. Towers occupied by IBM include 1250 René-Lévesque (Montreal, Canada) and One Atlantic Center (Atlanta, Georgia, US). In Beijing, China, IBM occupies Pangu Plaza ,

3174-570: The late 19th century. Julius E. Pitrap patented the computing scale in 1885; Alexander Dey invented the dial recorder (1888); Herman Hollerith patented the Electric Tabulating Machine (1889); and Willard Bundy invented a time clock to record workers' arrival and departure times on a paper tape (1889). On June 16, 1911, their four companies were amalgamated in New York State by Charles Ranlett Flint forming

3243-451: The latest being the IBM z series. The most recent model, the IBM z16 , was released in 2022. In 1990, IBM released the Power microprocessors , which were designed into many console gaming systems, including Xbox 360 , PlayStation 3 , and Nintendo 's Wii U . IBM Secure Blue is encryption hardware that can be built into microprocessors, and in 2014, the company revealed TrueNorth ,

3312-425: The longer term. The key trends of IBM are (as at the financial year ending December 31): The company's 15-member board of directors are responsible for overall corporate management and includes the current or former CEOs of Anthem , Dow Chemical , Johnson and Johnson , Royal Dutch Shell , UPS , and Vanguard as well as the president of Cornell University and a retired U.S. Navy admiral . Vanguard Group

3381-585: The mid-1950s. There are two other IBM buildings within walking distance of CHQ: the North Castle office, which previously served as IBM's headquarters; and the Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., Center for Learning (formerly known as IBM Learning Center (ILC)), a resort hotel and training center, which has 182 guest rooms, 31 meeting rooms, and various amenities. IBM operates in 174 countries as of 2016 , with mobility centers in smaller market areas and major campuses in

3450-613: The middleware built on top of those such as the CICS transaction processing monitor, had a near-monopoly-level market share and became the thing IBM was most known for during this period. In 1969, the United States of America alleged that IBM violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by monopolizing or attempting to monopolize the general-purpose electronic digital computer system market, specifically computers designed primarily for business, and subsequently alleged that IBM violated

3519-510: The number of workers involved (it required longer). The tendency for managers to repeat such errors in project development led Brooks to quip that his book is called "The Bible of Software Engineering", because "everybody quotes it, some people read it, and a few people go by it". The work was first published in 1975 ( ISBN   0-201-00650-2 ), reprinted with corrections in 1982, and republished in an anniversary edition with four extra chapters in 1995 ( ISBN   0-201-83595-9 ), including

SECTION 50

#1732779523053

3588-400: The parent company of Sesame Street , and Salesforce.com . In 2015, its chip division transitioned to a fabless model with semiconductors design, offloading manufacturing to GlobalFoundries . In 2015, IBM announced three major acquisitions: Merge Healthcare for $ 1 billion, data storage vendor Cleversafe , and all digital assets from The Weather Company , including Weather.com and

3657-401: The present day. The company later also found success in the portable space with the ThinkPad . Since the 1990s, IBM has concentrated on computer services , software , supercomputers , and scientific research ; it sold its microcomputer division to Lenovo in 2005. IBM continues to develop mainframes, and its supercomputers have consistently ranked among the most powerful in the world in

3726-411: The record for most annual U.S. patents generated by a business for 29 consecutive years from 1993 to 2021. IBM was founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), a holding company of manufacturers of record-keeping and measuring systems. It was renamed "International Business Machines" in 1924 and soon became the leading manufacturer of punch-card tabulating systems . During

3795-637: The system's reputation and maybe even the company. Every project manager should create a small core set of formal documents defining the project objectives, how they are to be achieved, who is going to achieve them, when they are going to be achieved, and how much they are going to cost. These documents may also reveal inconsistencies that are otherwise hard to see. When estimating project times, it should be remembered that programming products (which can be sold to paying customers) and programming systems are both three times as hard to write as simple independent in-house programs. It should be kept in mind how much of

3864-551: The system. Instead of every programmer having their own special set of tools, each team should have a designated tool-maker who may create tools that are highly customized for the job that team is doing (e.g. a code generator tool that creates code based on a specification). In addition, system-wide tools should be built by a common tools team, overseen by the project manager. There are two techniques for lowering software development costs that Brooks writes about: IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using

3933-543: The time the biggest in American corporate history. Lou Gerstner was hired as CEO from RJR Nabisco to turn the company around. In 1995, IBM purchased Lotus Software , best known for its Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet software. During the decade, IBM was working on a new operating system, named the Workplace OS project. Despite a large amount of money spent on the project, it was cancelled in 1996. In 1998, IBM merged

4002-436: The user's behalf, decides what goes in the system and what stays out. The architect or team of architects should develop an idea of what the system should do and make sure that this vision is understood by the rest of the team. A novel idea by someone may not be included if it does not fit seamlessly with the overall system design. In fact, to ensure a user-friendly system, a system may deliberately provide fewer features than it

4071-420: The users. When designing a new kind of system, a team will design a throw-away system (whether it intends to or not). This system acts as a "pilot plan" that reveals techniques that will subsequently cause a complete redesign of the system. This second, smarter system should be the one delivered to the customer, since delivery of the pilot system would cause nothing but agony to the customer, and possibly ruin

4140-608: The vacuum tube based IBM 701 , in 1952. The IBM 305 RAMAC introduced the hard disk drive in 1956. The company switched to transistorized designs with the 7000 and 1400 series, beginning in 1958. In which, IBM considered the 1400 series the ''model T'' of computing, due to it being the first computer with over ten thousand sales by IBM. In 1956, the company demonstrated the first practical example of artificial intelligence when Arthur L. Samuel of IBM's Poughkeepsie , New York, laboratory programmed an IBM 704 not merely to play checkers but "learn" from its own experience. In 1957,

4209-404: The way Amdahl's law relies on the distinction between "parallelizable" and "strictly serial". The second-system effect proposes that, when an architect designs a second system, it is the most dangerous system they will ever design, because they will tend to incorporate all of the additions they originally did not add to the first system due to inherent time constraints. Thus, when embarking on

SECTION 60

#1732779523053

4278-405: The work week will actually be spent on technical issues, as opposed to administrative or other non-technical tasks, such as meetings, and especially "stand-up" or "all-hands" meetings. To avoid disaster, all the teams working on a project should remain in contact with each other in as many ways as possible (e-mail, phone, meetings, memos, etc.). Instead of assuming something, implementers should ask

4347-488: Was acquired by Clayton & Dubilier in a leveraged buyout shortly after its formation. In September 1992, IBM completed the spin-off of their various non-mainframe and non-midrange, personal computer manufacturing divisions, combining them into an autonomous wholly owned subsidiary known as the IBM Personal Computer Company (IBM PC Co.). This corporate restructuring came after IBM reported

4416-536: Was announced that IBM will build Europe's first quantum computer in Ehningen, Germany . The center, to be operated by the Fraunhofer Society , was still in construction as of 2023, with cloud access planned in 2024. Programming product Software as a product (SaaP) is software that is designed to be sold to users who pay for a license that allows the user to install and use the software on

4485-400: Was completely out of IBM. IBM is headquartered in Armonk, New York , a community 37 miles (60 km) north of Midtown Manhattan. A nickname for the company is the " Colossus of Armonk ". Its principal building, referred to as CHQ, is a 283,000-square-foot (26,300 m ) glass and stone edifice on a 25-acre (10 ha) parcel amid a 432-acre former apple orchard the company purchased in

4554-400: Was exhibited on Jeopardy! where it won against game-show champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The company also celebrated its 100th anniversary in the same year on June 16. In 2012, IBM announced it had agreed to buy Kenexa and Texas Memory Systems, and a year later it also acquired SoftLayer Technologies, a web hosting service , in a deal worth around $ 2 billion. Also that year,

4623-640: Was originally part of the joint venture and was sold by LG in 2012. Continuing a trend started in the 1990s of downsizing its operations and divesting from commodity production , IBM sold all of its personal computer business to Chinese technology company Lenovo and, in 2009, it acquired software company SPSS Inc. Later in 2009, IBM's Blue Gene supercomputing program was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by U.S. President Barack Obama . In 2011, IBM gained worldwide attention for its artificial intelligence program Watson , which

4692-507: Was recognized with the 1990 Honor Award from the National Building Museum . IBM has a large and diverse portfolio of products and services. As of 2016 , these offerings fall into the categories of cloud computing , artificial intelligence, commerce , data and analytics , Internet of things (IoT), IT infrastructure , mobile , digital workplace and cybersecurity . Since 1954, IBM sells mainframe computers ,

4761-480: Was valued at over $ 153 billion as of May 2024. Despite its relative decline within the technology sector, IBM remains the seventh largest technology company by revenue, and 67th largest overall company by revenue in the United States . IBM ranked No. 38 on the 2020 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue. In 2014, IBM was accused of using "financial engineering" to hit its quarterly earnings targets rather than investing for

#52947