Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Keeping IBM whole
Gerstner's insight was that IBM was pretty mediocre at everything. That is the price of monopoly: once a company has been one, it loses its capacity to be good because it never needed to compete. Splitting IBM up would have produced component pieces that were all mediocre.
Bringing business online
The internet was coming, and plenty of companies knew they had to get online without knowing how. IBM built a huge consulting force and a middleware layer between a company's old mainframe and modern web services, so the company could have a website and an e-commerce site. IBM basically brought corporate America online, and the model gave it a 30-year lease on life.
Microsoft's version
Microsoft's AI strategy follows that script. It offers a platform and harness in the middle, with backwards compatibility to the 80s, and manages the changing models underneath. Middleware saws off the sharp edges, so customers get a lowest-common-denominator experience. Microsoft is building data centers for inference rather than training, which is part of why it has money to spare.
Why was IBM seen as a break-up candidate?
IBM lost billions of dollars in the early 1990s as personal computers eroded its mainframe business. Its reported losses reached roughly $8 billion in 1993. Analysts and some insiders argued that separate pieces would be worth more than the whole, and the board hired Gerstner in 1993 from RJR Nabisco.
How does middleware connect mainframes to the web?
Middleware sits between two systems and translates requests from one into the format the other understands. A web store could ask for an order, and the middleware passed it to the mainframe in the form the old program expected. IBM launched its WebSphere software in 1998 for this kind of work.
Why does a monopoly lose its edge?
Without rivals forcing it to improve, a monopoly has little reason to sharpen products or cut costs. Internal rivalries and slow decisions can grow because nothing outside punishes them. The US Justice Department sued IBM in 1969 under antitrust law and dropped the case in 1982.
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