IBM is not the subject of any excerpt in the source material. It appears in four episodes of The Bob Zadek Show as an example, an analogy or a piece of local scenery, invoked by speakers making arguments about other things: the transitory nature of business power, the record of American antitrust enforcement, the naming of a fictional computer, the strategy of product differentiation, and the criminalization of parental judgment. The excerpts supply no account of the company’s founding, its products, its executives or its history, and no guest or host addresses it at length.
Transitory corporate power
In a 2011 episode on crony capitalism, Bob Zadek distinguished business from free markets, arguing that many American businesses would prefer the absence of a free market and that the home of laissez-faire resides for the most part in small business. He named General Electric as an example and said he and his guest would discuss Jeffrey Immelt and GE later in the morning Obama Nationalizes General Electric (2011).
IBM enters the hour only in a rhetorical question. Asking what became of big, powerful Xerox, IBM and Microsoft, Bob framed the answer himself: a business’s power in a marketplace tends to be transitory, and the railroads were all powerful until there were planes and trucks. Private business, on this account, holds only temporary power, whereas the power of government seems far more permanent, and the tools available to eliminate it are fewer than those available against private business. IBM thus serves as one item in a list of firms whose dominance did not last — a list offered to contrast corporate transience with governmental durability. The guest, Luigi Zingales, agreed with Bob’s broader claim that the larger the role for government, the more scope business has to direct government resources in its favor, but he did not take up the IBM example Obama Nationalizes General Electric (2011).
The IBM antitrust case
IBM receives its most substantive treatment in a 2019 episode on antitrust, in a passage attributed to Ryan Young, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who researches regulatory policy, trade policy and antitrust regulation, and who co-authored with Wayne Crews a piece titled “The Terrible Ten of Antitrust Policies” Antitrust 101 with Ryan Young (2019).
Bob introduced the segment by describing antitrust regulation as a federal statute that purports to be economic in nature, protecting the free market from a thumb on the scales and protecting the freedom of the marketplace from monopolistic practices without defining that. He asked Young whether the statute, applied, had ever accomplished an improvement in the marketplace as opposed to simply destroying bigness per se and helping competitors rather than consumers. Young answered that it was very difficult to make that case and that he would argue it is impossible Antitrust 101 with Ryan Young (2019).
Young’s survey of major cases began with Standard Oil, which he described as a company continually cutting its prices and increasing its supply while the antitrust case proceeded, and whose kerosene-lamp market was killed by Thomas Edison’s electric light before the automobile created new demand for gasoline. He concluded that the case was a waste of time. He then turned to IBM: there was the IBM case in the 1960s that lasted for about 13 years, by which time the government decided to drop the case altogether because the technological issue at hand had long since become obsolete. Young characterized this as a common theme in the tech industry. He went on to the Microsoft case of the late 1990s, which he said was mainly over Microsoft’s inclusion of a free browser in its Windows operating system, and which ended in a settlement that was neither a victory nor a defeat for either side. Young’s summary judgment was that across the long history of major cases there had not been a single one that — at which point Bob interrupted to ask about AT&T and Bell Labs Antitrust 101 with Ryan Young (2019).
The IBM case, in Young’s telling, is an example of a prosecution overtaken by technological change rather than a decision on the merits. The excerpt does not state what the government alleged, what the trial court held, which statute or amendment was at issue, or when the case was filed or dismissed beyond the rough decade of the 1960s and the duration of about thirteen years.
HAL and the computer giant
IBM appears again in a 2017 episode on artificial intelligence, in a monologue by Bob Zadek rather than in anything said by his guest, Luis Perez-Breva. Recalling 2001: A Space Odyssey and the malevolent robot HAL, Bob posed a trivia question about where the name came from and then supplied the answer himself: the letters H-A-L are one letter before I-B-M, which was then the computer giant, maybe the only computer company of any — which people knew about. He described this as a little-known fun fact Luis Perez-Breva on Artificial Intelligence Myths (2017).
Perez-Breva declined to spoil the fun before the answer was given, saying only that he did know. He did not comment on IBM, and the remainder of the exchange concerned artificial intelligence as a productivity tool — Bob’s summary that a machine governed by artificial intelligence does some of the work a human does and does it better, so that the human becomes more productive and more valuable, and Perez-Breva’s example of Google search replacing a trip to the library. IBM’s only role in the episode is as the source of the letters behind a fictional computer’s name Luis Perez-Breva on Artificial Intelligence Myths (2017).
Different is better than better
In a 2015 episode with John Chisholm, IBM appears in a list of laptop manufacturers. Chisholm, discussing his book Unleash Your Inner Company, offered the formulation “different is better than better” and illustrated it with the personal computer market. Lenovo, IBM, Dell and HP all make laptops that run Microsoft Windows, he said, and each one is better than the other — a 20% bigger screen, a 20% faster processor, what have you. Apple, by contrast, is different: it designed the hardware and the software together, made the machines easier to use, focused on user interface, and was good for publishing early on, then music, then video. Apple established a small base that really liked the Mac, and the things it did well became mainstream; over time Apple and the Mac gradually took market share away from Windows, and today Apple is the most valuable company in the world, by market capitalization John Chisholm’s Advice for Unleashing Your Inner Company (2015).
IBM here is one of four undifferentiated Windows laptop makers, named alongside Lenovo, Dell and HP. The excerpt does not say what IBM’s relationship to Lenovo was, whether IBM still made laptops at the time of the conversation, or what became of its personal computer business. Chisholm’s advice was to find a niche competitors are not focused on, serve a small customer base well, and grow with them. Bob responded that he had fashioned his life around looking for businesses and activities other people were not aware of, preferring to avoid competition head-on John Chisholm’s Advice for Unleashing Your Inner Company (2015).
A parking lot in Row X
The fourth appearance is incidental. In a 2014 episode with Lenore Skenazy about the criminalization of parental judgment, Skenazy discussed the case of a mother in New Jersey who left an 18-month-old asleep in the car while running a mall errand, was arrested, was found guilty of negligence, and lost unanimously in the appellate court, which wrote that it did not have to list all the horrors that could have attended the child while the mother was away Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014).
Skenazy’s point was about the difference between a child left for hours and a child left for minutes. She cited Andrea Peyser of the New York Post, who did the numbers, and said the numbers show you are actually more in danger walking across a parking lot than waiting in a car, and that more children have died in parking lots and driveways than have died while waiting in cars. Her practical advice was that if you see a child in a car at the IBM parking lot in Row X, then yes, call and alert the authorities and put it over the loudspeaker — but if you see a child waiting in a car in front of the drugstore or the pizza stand, wait there for a few minutes, and if the parent does not come back in ten or fifteen minutes, then try to find them or do something else. IBM’s parking lot is simply the example of a large facility where a child left alone would warrant concern; the excerpt says nothing else about the company Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014).
Across episodes
IBM is touched on in four episodes — 2011, 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2019 — but the excerpts show no development of a single question about the company. Each mention serves a different argument: transitory corporate power in 2011, parental negligence in 2014, product differentiation in 2015, the naming of HAL in 2017, and the record of antitrust enforcement in 2019. The only speaker to say anything substantive about IBM as a firm is Ryan Young, and his claim — that the government dropped its case after about thirteen years because the technological issue had become obsolete — is not revisited or contested in any other excerpt.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts contain no founding date, no founder, no headquarters, no product history and no account of IBM’s management or current business. They do not state what the government alleged in the antitrust case, what any court held, which statute or amendment was at issue, or the case’s name. They do not explain IBM’s relationship to Lenovo or to the personal computer market, and they do not say what became of the company after the periods discussed. Nothing in the sources addresses IBM’s role in computing history, its research operations, or its treatment by regulators beyond the single sentence about the dropped case.