Founders · Jun 3Agreed to pay $30 million on signing and $30 million on shipping plus royalties, but the deal died after Jobs skipped the Dallas pitch to 800 IBM engineers. IBM quoted Dell two years for a configure-and-buy site while NeXT said one week.
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Founders · Nov 4IBM's published research papers on relational databases became the blueprint for Oracle's first product, and Ellison aimed at minicomputers to avoid the conservative IBM mainframe market. He later fought IBM so Oracle was seen as a software heavyweight.
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David Senra · Oct 12Dell opened the IBM PC and found every chip, drive and power supply was bought in, so he priced the parts through distributors and saw a huge markup. IBM also called the PC a fine terminal for the mainframe, which Dell cites as a failure to adapt.
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Founders · Sep 23With nearly $30 billion in revenue, IBM readily accepted a non-exclusive DOS deal without per-copy royalties. It was later criticized for giving away the store, as Microsoft licensed MS-DOS to every other maker.
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Acquired · Jan 26Qualcomm's shift to TSMC in 1997 or 1998 showed Chang that IBM was in trouble. He declined IBM's 1999 offer to co-develop 130nm, and IBM went to UMC instead.
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Acquired · Jan 20Its own chip yield was about 10% while TI's line was near 0%, until Chang raised TI's to 20% in four months. It thought he was lucky until he explained his theories to its engineers.
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Lenny's Podcast · Jul 28It sold across Africa in USD only and converted poorly. After starting in South Africa and adding the rand, results improved a lot. It also builds attribution in-house.
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Acquired · Jul 21Microsoft's SQL Server on cheap x86 boxes undercut IBM mainframes, and Exchange and Outlook beat Lotus Notes, which IBM bought for $3.5 billion in 1995.
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Acquired · Apr 21It paid Microsoft a fixed $430,000 with no royalties and let it license DOS to anyone, then saw clones erode its PC market. Its OS/2 flopped in 1987, and Microsoft passed it in market cap in January 1993.
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Lenny's Podcast · Jan 21Gerstner saw that IBM was respected inside every large corporation and told it to bear hug customers. When computing moved to the cloud, those same big customers hesitated and held IBM back.
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Founders · Oct 3Jobs mocked IBM as lumbering and missed what its first PC meant. Later it offered to license NeXTSTEP with about $6 million in capital, but Jobs held out for more money and the deal collapsed.
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Acquired · Sep 5Like Oracle, it earned roughly 80% gross margins on licenses, audits and paid upgrades and would not cannibalize them for metered cloud billing.
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