IBM's long slow decline from the most admired company with the most revenues in the Fortune 500 for a few years in the 60s and 70s is well documented and everyone has opinions. I was there for most of the systemic decline from the early 80s to recently.
I find this video and history lesson about IBM essentially inventing relational databases in 1970 by Edgar Codd in IBM Research to in many ways be the microcosm of IBM time and time again "inventing" something really cool but then due to size, politics, ineptness, lack of leadership etc, BLOWING IT.
In this case the video shows Larry Ellison at Oracle kicked IBM's a-s for decades in relational databases after IBM wandered in the woods with Codd's amazing invention. Today Oracle is about $50B in sales and IBM $60B. Do the math if IBM had not blown it to Larry in databases and Bill in PC OS's etc. Total ineptness by mid and senior IBM managers, most of whom were sales and finance execs and not technical marvels.
Today Ellison has a net worth of $238,000,000,000.
I hope you enjoy the video history lesson since in many ways it has been repeated by IBM time and time again and here we are IBM trying to save it's way to prosperity by moving 90% of IBM to India. Now IBM no longer MAKES anything. They just have Finance etc look to buy and sell other companies inventions like a hedge fund.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG5hYn93GQ8&t=187s
Our story begins in 1970 with the biggest computer company of the time IBM
with an employee of IBM by the name Edgar F. Codd, a research paper titled "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks" it laid the groundwork for the development of RDBMS. IBM simply did nothing with his research, and IBM refused to implement the relational model to preserve revenue coming from its existing hierarchical database products. However, Codd bypassed IBM and showed IBM customers the potential of implementing his relational database model, The result was System R It introduced SQL, a new language for querying and managing data, which would become the industry standard. its first commercial RDBMS product, which was based on the System R prototype. While DB2 was technically advanced and enjoyed some success it was a little too late for IBM to dominate the relational database market as other competitors had already been in the market for years, during this period IBM was also entangled in the intense personal computer war and took a cautious approach opting to focus on its existing mainframe business and its new entrance in the personal computer market this limited its ability to capitalize on the growing demand for relational databases. One person who saw the potential of relational databases before IBM did was Larry Ellison.
Larry Elison was an excellent student and after graduating from high school, he enrolled at the University of Illinois in 1962, majoring in physics. Ellison enrolled at the University of Chicago, hoping to continue his education and find a new path. Ellison made the life-changing decision to move to California, The late 1960s and early 1970s were a period of rapid technological advancement, and Silicon Valley was becoming a hub for innovation in computing. It was in this environment that Ellison’s interest in programming began to take shape. One of Ellison’s early jobs in the technology field was at Ampex Corporation, a company known for its work in electronics and data storage. While working at Ampex, Ellison was exposed to some of the most advanced computing technologies of the time, including mainframe systems and magnetic tape storage. It was here that Ellison first encountered the concept of relational databases, a new approach to data management. He had come across Edgar Codd’s paper which outlined the principles of relational databases, a revolutionary way of organizing and retrieving data that would make information management more efficient and scalable. n the mid-1970s, after gaining valuable experience at Ampex and other tech companies, Ellison, along with his colleagues Bob Miner and Ed Oates, founded Software Development Laboratories (SDL) At the time, relational databases were still a theoretical concept, and most companies were using more traditional hierarchical and network database systems.
n 1979, SDL released Oracle V2, the world’s first commercial relational database management system. Oracle’s success was rapid, and the company quickly grew into a leader in the database industry. In 1982, SDL officially changed its name to Oracle Corporation, reflecting the centrality of the Oracle database product to the company’s identity. Ingres was a company that emerged from a research project at the University of California, Berkeley. The Ingres project, like IBM's System R, was based on Codd's relational model and sought to develop an RDBMS that could be used for both academic research and commercial applications.
One of Oracle’s most important early alliances was with the U.S. government, specifically the CIA. Oracle’s first major contract was to build a relational database for the CIA,. Sybase was another significant player in the database wars, founded in 1984 by Mark Hoffman, Bob Epstein, and Tom Haggin. The company quickly gained a foothold in the market with its innovative approach to client-server computing, where the database server was separated from the client application. This architecture allowed for greater scalability and flexibility, making Sybase a popular choice for businesses with large, distributed computing environments. In 1988, Sybase entered into a partnership with Microsoft to co-develop a version of SQL Server for the OS/2 operating system
MySQL's target market was developers building web applications, small businesses, and startups that couldn’t afford the high costs of enterprise database software. MySQL’s simplicity, ease of use, and integration with popular web development languages like PHP made it the go-to choice for building dynamic websites and web applications