By Graeme Wearden
Publication Date: 2025-12-28 17:15:00
Louis Gerstner, the businessman credited with turning around IBM, has died aged 83, the company announced on Sunday.
Gerstner was chair and CEO of IBM from 1993 to 2002, a time when the company was struggling for relevance in the face of competition from rivals such as Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.
After becoming the first outsider to run the company, Gerstner abandoned a plan to split IBM, which was known as Big Blue, into a number of autonomous “Baby Blues” that would have focused on specific product areas such as processors or software.
IBM’s current chair and CEO, Arvind Krishna, told staff in an email on Sunday that this decision was key to the company’s survival because “Lou understood that clients didn’t want fragmented technology, they wanted integrated solutions.”
“Lou arrived at IBM at a moment when the company’s future was genuinely uncertain,” he wrote.
“The industry was changing rapidly, our business was under pressure, and there was serious debate…
