They also were pioneers of modern industrial practices. They researched the best approaches to workforce scalability, settling on a model of many distributed offices spread around cheap peripheral suburbs - something that might sound banal today, but it in the 60s/70s, when even factories were supposed to be as close as possible to downtown, it was pretty bold.

IBM has many shortcomings but they did manage to survive and navigate a century of tumultuous technological changes. Very few companies have done that.