Did they ever LEAVE that business model?
I don't know much about it, but in their 2010 Annual Report they said "By becoming a very different company from what we were just a few years ago, we have become much more like the company IBM has been for most of it's history." There was a while when making "IBM-compatible personal computers" (or "computers", as we call them now) was a major revenue-earner for them, and that seems like a major departure from what they'd been doing since the 1910s.
Well, fair enough, but I still think he's manipulating history to make a cheap point, and I didn't find the article to be particularly convincing. After reading this illuminating article my bullshit detector goes wild almost every time I see any disruption talk come up in pieces like this. The reason I found it to be particularly bullshit in this case is that from my understanding, IBM went into the PC market because that was the major opportunity for growth at the time, and it really made sense. But their core competence was still mainframes, and business solutions. Once the PC boom was over, they had much less reason to stay in an increasingly competitive industry, and instead went back to focusing on their main strengths. Is that reinvention? If anything, I'd argue that they were just flexibly adapting to the times, and took advantage of an opportunity, but didn't necessarily change their core values.
That phrase "core values" brought to mind what Wikipedia says about their recent shift: Granted, the values they chose sound to me like empty corporate platitudes (what company isn't looking to please their customers, innovate, and act responsibly?) -- but the act of organization-wide soul-searching and following through with plans to put the new values into action suggests a moment of reinvention. I read the New Yorker article; it make a good case for an outspoken advocate of the disruption paradigm being a charlatan, but I don't see the arguments of the OP hinging on the disruption paradigm of business evolution. I read it more as Mayer failing by replicating the outwardly obvious characteristics of Jobs's approach, without the insight necessary to do what Jobs actually would have done in the situation. But I think my interpretation read between the lines a bit; I found the history more interesting than the author's angle.In 2003, IBM initiated a project to rewrite its company values. Using its Jam technology, the company hosted Internet-based online discussions on key business issues with 50,000 employees over 3 days. The discussions were analyzed by sophisticated text analysis software (eClassifier) to mine online comments for themes. As a result of the 2003 Jam, the company values were updated to reflect three modern business, marketplace and employee views: "Dedication to every client's success", "Innovation that matters—for our company and for the world", "Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships". In 2004, another Jam was conducted during which 52,000 employees exchanged best practices for 72 hours. They focused on finding actionable ideas to support implementation of the values previously identified.