IBM Is America’s Worst Big Tech Company

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Oct 26, 8:18AM EDT

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For decades, IBM was the premier tech company in the world. That was no longer the case a decade ago. A demonstration of its fall is a comparison of the market cap of America’s premier public tech corporations. IBM is far short of the leaders. (These 20 American companies have the worst reputations.)

IBM has a market cap of $125 billion. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s is $2.52 trillion. Alphabet, Amazon, and Nvidia are all over $1 trillion.

Its Prospects for a Rebound

IBM has tried to bill itself as a force in cloud computing. While it is in the business, its market share is small. If there is a hallmark of successful tech companies now, they either have a large footprint in cloud revenue or are part of the early leadership in artificial intelligence.

According to CRN, IBM’s global cloud market share is 3%, which has fallen recently. However, Google’s share is 11%, Microsoft’s is 21% and Amazon’s is 32%. CRN points out that “Amazon Web Services continues to be the dominant worldwide market share leader in cloud services, winning 32 percent share of the global market. AWS was a pioneer in cloud computing and has led the market for over a decade.”
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In the most recent quarter, IBM’s revenue rose only 5% to $14.8 billion. Compare that to Microsoft’s revenue, which rose 13% in its most recent quarter to $56.5 billion. IBM’s net income was $1.7 billion, while Microsoft’s was $22.3 billion.
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If IBM had been a small company two decades ago, its current situation might be called progress. In the year 2000, it ranked number six on the Fortune 500. Its revenue was much higher than it is today. On the most recent list, IBM ranked 65th. Microsoft ranked 13th.

Investors know that this company will never claim the spot it had at the turn of the century, and its market value is the primary evidence.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.