Sometime in the 90s they decided that becoming a services and consultancy provider was more important than being involved in large-scale commodity hardware or really anything else.<p>Over three decades they've exited commodity hardware (x-series and thinkpads), retreated from a lot of software stuff and generally gone as hard as they can for large-scale business contracts. They seem to keep a decent amount of cutting-edge hardware research going, Power is still broadly competitive with x86 AFAICT, but the volumes have got to be pretty low these days and I half suspect that some of it is just a "Hey look at us we're still here" play rather than actually feeding into products, because services are the profit-centre.<p>They're still huge and have a lot of money, and they own Redhat. But IMHO it's in a long, slow decline, and it has stepped back from the public eye and most public-facing markets.<p>Context - I've worked for them in a few places. Obvs my opinons are my own, especially as I've been 'out' for over a decade at this point.