Well, with this statement about computers, someone really made a mistake in 1943. It was made by Thomas Watson, IBM’s chairman at the time, in person (but only orally). Thomas Watson was chairman of IBM until his death in 1956. And, incidentally, the richest man of his time.

We probably don’t need to introduce you to the International Business Machines Corporation – the full meaning behind the abbreviation IBM. Here are a few current figures: IBM currently employs about 345,000 people worldwide and is one of the world’s largest software manufacturers. Its current stock market value is over $181 billion.

In March 2018, IBM unveiled the world’s smallest computer; at just 1 x 1 millimeters, it’s the size of a coarse grain of salt. The computing power of the mini processor is said to reach the level of an x86 processor from the nineties. Of course, we hope that more than 5 of them will be sold in the future 😉

And even if computers themselves are not IBM’s main business, their products are mainly about software for computers. So if there were only five computers in the world, IBM would certainly not be so successful today.

And just for comparison, the actual number: 275 million computers were sold in 2020 alone.

As you can see, a statement can turn out to be so wrong that many large companies would not even exist today if the statement had been correct.

Your Faktor Zehn

Sources:

https://www.computerwoche.de/a/die-spektakulaersten-fehlprognosen-der-it-geschichte,2532211

https://www.ibm.com/de-de