A comprehensive guide to why major companies with a heritage in electronics failed to establish themselves as leaders in the computer industry. Uses case studies to analyze the efforts of GE, RCA, English Electric, EMI and Ferranti to compete with business machine firms in the early mainframe computer market, primarily focusing on the USA's IBM and the UK's ICT. These case studies cover many important themes in enterprise organization and capabilities, and how the heritage which these firms came from was important to the performance of the corporation in a new and innovative market place. It critiques the value of economies of scope in productive and technical capabilities unless matched to equal competencies in customer understanding and market reach, and provides a guide to the both the business strategies and the technologies, which were fundamental to building our current information society.

Uses case studies to explore why large scale electronics failed to win a leadership position in the early computer industry and why IBM, a firm with a heritage in the business machines industry, succeeded. The cases cover both the US and the UK industry focusing on electronics giants GE, RCA, English Electric, EMI and Ferranti.

Traces the emergence and development of the computer industry in the United States as seen in the economic, historical, and social context of its times from the early twentieth century to the present.

Provides Western business people with the information they need to analyze market trends in the Chinese computer industry, and to understand the unwritten rules that are crucial to playing the Chinese business "game" successfully.

The challenges faced by IBM's research and development laboratories, the technological paths they chose, and how these choices affected the company and the computer industry.

The computer services industry has worldwide annual revenues of nearly a trillion dollars and employs millions of workers, but is often overshadowed by the hardware and software products industries. In this book, Jeffrey Yost shows how computer services, from consulting and programming to data analytics and cloud computing, have played a crucial role in shaping information technology -- in making IT work. Tracing the evolution of the computer services industry from the 1950s to the present, Yost provides case studies of important companies (including IBM, Hewlett Packard, Andersen/Accenture, EDS, Infosys, and others) and profiles of such influential leaders as John Diebold, Ross Perot, and Virginia Rometty. He offers a fundamental reinterpretation of IBM as a supplier of computer services rather than just a producer of hardware, exploring how IBM bundled services with hardware for many years before becoming service-centered in the 1990s. Yost describes the emergence of companies that offered consulting services, data processing, programming, and systems integration. He examines the development of industry-defining trade associations; facilities management and the firm that invented it, Ross Perot's EDS; time sharing, a precursor of the cloud; IBM's early computer services; and independent contractor brokerages. Finally, he explores developments since the 1980s: the transformations of IBM and Hewlett Packard; the offshoring of enterprises and labor; major Indian IT service providers and the changing geographical deployment of U.S.-based companies; and the paradigm-changing phenomenon of cloud service.

"Focusing on the early years of computer development (late 1940s to mid-1950s), this paper analyzes the role that government, especially the Department of Defense, played as a sponsor of university and corporate computer research-and-development efforts. The study examines the position of dominance the United States held in the computer industry by the late 1950s and retains today, attempting to analyze how much of this is due to early government support. The author suggests that, while U.S. dominance in the international computer market has eroded, it is not likely to lose that dominance in the near future."--Rand abstracts.

This book warns that retaining U.S. preeminence in computing at the beginning of the next century will require long-term planning, leadership, and collective will that cannot be attained with a business-as-usual approach by industry or government. This consensus emerged from a colloquium of top executives from the U.S. computer sector, university and industry researchers, and government policymakers. Among the major issues discussed are long-term, or strategic, commitment on the part of large firms in the United States; cooperation within and among firms and between industry, universities, and government; weaknesses in manufacturing and in the integration of research, development, and manufacturing; technical standards for both hardware and software manufacture and operation; and education and infrastructure (in particular, computer networks).

In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. Marie Hicks's Programmed inequality explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones, and gender discrimination caused the nation's largest computer user - the civil service and sprawling public sector -- to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole. Programmed inequality shows how the disappearance of women from the field has grave macroeconomic consequences for Britain, and why the United States risks repeating those errors in the twenty-first century.