NPR. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Everybody knows this expression, right? In other words, why mess with success?

But if you look at the world at big tech, you often see companies rejecting this philosophy.

Think about how Facebook for a couple years now has been trying to reinvent itself as the

Metaverse company, or Microsoft pivoting to AI, or Twitter turning into X and trying to be the everything app.

If you flipped through the pages of tech industry folklore,

you'd see this philosophy actually goes back decades to the early years of the computer

industry and a company called International Business Machines or just IBM. Now

maybe you've seen this name stuck to a dusty ancient looking computer stuff somewhere in the back of a relative's attic

Well IBM was founded over a century ago in New York

Everything that we take for granted as part of our digital world started there.

Mark Wortman is a journalist and the co-author of a new book called The Greatest Capitalist

who ever lived. Tom Watson Jr. and the epic story of how IBM

created the digital age.

IBM laid the rails for the information technology industry and the future that we now live in.

And Mark argues that those rails can be traced directly to a time about 60 years ago

when IBM CEO essentially scrapped its existing business

and bet the company's future on a new kind of technology that did not even exist yet.

This is the indicator for planet money.

I'm Adrian Ma.

And I'm Wailen Wong.

Long before Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon,

there was IBM.

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