The tech giant nobody sees still runs the world behind the scenes

IBM has not sold you anything in 21 years. No laptop, no phone, no icon on your home screen. The last product an ordinary person could walk into a store and buy left the company in 2005, and nearly everything consumer-facing since has been sold off or wound down.

Plenty of people have never knowingly touched an IBM product. They touch one constantly. The machine that approves a card at the gas pump, checks a balance at an ATM, or clears a payroll run at 3 a.m. is very likely IBM hardware sitting in a building nobody photographs. Tech history is crowded with companies that lost the consumer market and vanished, often after fighting dirty on the way down, the way Microsoft did to its DOS rivals. IBM lost the consumer market on purpose and kept the profitable half.

IBM walked away from consumers on purpose

The ThinkPad sale was the clean break

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