[Sven7]

Also well worth reading about T.J Watson.

IBM was one of the few American companies that had no layoffs during the depression in the 30's.

Inventories built up. No sales. And he was almost fired.

Once the recovery started every company and govt in the world wanted a computer and the rest is history.

[mseebach]

That was only obvious in retrospect, and has very strong survivor-bias: it might as well have sunk the company, and IBM would have been completely unknown today.

Also, things are a bit different today: IBM is largely a services company, which doesn't lend itself well to inventory building. Also, they have struggled on the merit of their offerings, not the economical climate, for a very long time. Doubling down right now is not obvisouly going to end well.

[lovemenot]

Recovery from the Depression in the USA started in the mid-late thirties. Are you saying IBM sold computers at that time? Just a matter of terminology here. I would probably not classify IBM's business machines as computers until the 1950's.

[Sven7]

"Computers" were actually clerks in the census office that spent their days manually adding up and multiplying things. They got replaced by IBM's tabulators well before the 30's. But you are right IBM's inventory at the time was mostly tabulators.