IBM chief executive during rise of PC
The New York Times
John Akers, the chief executive and chairman of IBM during a turbulent time when the rise of the personal computer undercut the profitability of the mainframe computer business, died Friday in Boston. He was 79.
His death was confirmed Saturday by Edward Barbini, a spokesman for IBM, who said the cause of death was a stroke.
Akers, a former Navy pilot, excelled in IBM's insular, clean-cut culture, beginning as a sales trainee in San Francisco and rising to become, in 1985, the sixth chief executive of the company. The next year, he added the role of chairman.
But as he took the helm, IBM was struggling. Smaller, more powerful machines using less-expensive technology were chipping away at the mainframe computer business that had once been highly lucrative.
That led Akers to push IBM to change its course, including pursuing a reorganization that would have divided the huge company into more than a dozen independent businesses, some competing with one another. He said those divisions could be more nimble outside the company's notorious bureaucracy.
Yet David Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School, said Akers held on to IBM's mindset of the 1970s and '80s, when the company was seen as one of the world's great corporate successes, and where employees could expect stable careers and lifetime employment. Because of that, Yoffie said, he did not lay people off, trying instead to trim the payroll through milder measures, like offering older workers financial incentives to retire.
A Section on 08/25/2014