Comment by kelnos

We can cherry-pick blunders made by any big company to make a point. Maybe it would be more honest to also list companies IBM passed on that turned out to be rubbish? And all the technologies that IBM did invest in that made them a ton of money and became industry standards?[0]

Today, Xerox has less total revenue than IBM has profit. DEC went out of business 27 years ago. Apple is an in astoundingly great place right now, but Jobs got kicked out of his own company, and then returned when it was about to fail, having to take investment from Microsoft(!) in order to stay afloat.

Meanwhile, IBM is still here, making money hand over fist. We might not have a ton of respect for them, being mostly a consulting services company these days, but they're doing just fine.

[0] As another commenter points out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131245