Absolutely this IBM. In 1989, they owned the PC market. It was theirs. Of course the cracks were deep and deepening, but IBM still could have maintained a leadership of that industry to this day. Instead, they squeezed so hard the PC market fell from their iron grip.

The fact IBM still exists and is an important company is irrelevant. They lost control of the de facto computing standard. Microsoft could lose control as well.

Maybe, but the markets also shift. Companies evolve. Old products fade out of importance and new goods and services appear. Their company value has never been higher.

I'm not sure I would have liked a world where IBM continued to control so much - we probably would have a much smaller open ecosystem.

Yes, but it's the same story with Microsoft now. If they lose control over the PC market, it can only make it better.

I mean, the stuff I was hearing about Microsoft over a decade ago was that they were giving up on the OS and moving everything to a cloud based SaaS model. Basically, focusing energy where the money is.

Talk is cheap. Remind me of this, if/when the "will build" has changed to "has built".

If you are at JPMorgan or aerospace today using quantum computing, there is a very good chance you are using an IBM Heron 156 qubit scalable computer. They have been pushing quantum computers into very large companies for quite awhile now.

Google is strictly in research mode, but doing a lot of good, hard work.