Silicon rally

By THE DATA TEAM

INTERNATIONAL Business Machines (IBM) must rank as a case study in corporate survival. Founded in 1911 as a manufacturer of punch-card machines, more than a century later it remains one of the largest technology companies in the world. Where once it made mechanical behemoths for reading and manipulating paper cards, today it focuses on providing computing services and software to clients across the world.

But the days of Big Blue’s dominance are long past. It was recently surpassed in market value by Facebook, a company barely a decade old. As the market has grown, technology companies have proliferated. Though today’s tech giants are larger than ever, even Apple, now the largest publicly traded company in America, accounts for less than a quarter of the market. Many companies that supplanted IBM during the 1980s and 1990s, such as Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, now find themselves in eclipse. All three are trying to make a comeback by pushing into cloud computing, meaning that data are stored and crunched on remote servers.