从IBM到苹果 一张图看懂科技巨头盛衰史

INTERNATIONAL Business Machines (IBM) must rank as a case study in corporate survival. Founded in 1911 as a manufacturer of punch-card machines, more than a century later it remains one of the largest technology companies in the world.
国际商业机器公司（IBM）无疑被人们视为公司生存的典范。它创立于1911年，当时是一家穿孔卡片机制造商。一个多世纪后，它仍然是世界最大的科技公司之一。

Where once it made mechanical behemoths for reading and manipulating paper cards, today it focuses on providing computing services and software to clients across the world.
过去，IBM生产读取和处理纸质卡片的巨型计算机；现在，它致力于为遍及全球的客户们提供计算服务和软件。

But the days of Big Blue’s dominance are long past. It was recently surpassed in market value by Facebook, a company barely a decade old. As the market has grown, technology companies have proliferated.
但蓝色巨人的统治期早已过去。最近，IBM的市值被刚满10周岁的Facebook超过。

Though today’s tech giants are larger than ever, even Apple, now the largest publicly traded company in America, accounts for less than a quarter of the market.
尽管今日的科技巨头们比以往任何时候都要庞大，但就算是美国最大的上市公司苹果，也没能超过前100强市值总额的四分之一。

Many companies that supplanted  IBM during the 1980s and 1990s, such as Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, now find themselves in eclipse. All three are trying to make a comeback by pushing into cloud computing, meaning that data are stored and crunched on remote servers.上世纪八九十年代中，惠普、微软等许多公司超过IBM，但它们如今都已光辉不再。这三家公司都努力试图通过云计算卷土重来。这一技术意味数据会在远程服务器上存储和处理。