Doesn’t anyone atop IBM know the company’s history? Lending weight to the argument that IBM Corp’s biggest tragedy was that the US anti-trust suit against the company was abandoned and the company wasn’t broken up, that wise old management guru Peter Drucker, writing in the Wall Street Journal, recalls how the company’s founder, Thomas Watson Sr, was so wedded to the punch card machine in the early 1950s that he insisted that it be sold as a peripheral to the then-newborn computers that IBM was beginning to sell, and ordered the salesforce never to push computers if a single card-punch machine order were lost as a result – Fortunately for IBM, he adds in an aside, the Justice Department at that very instant filed an anti-trust suit that forced the company out of the punch card business; otherwise IBM would surely have gone the way of the punch card.
