IBM is not "major" anymore in the sense of major tech companies that the person above meant.

I don't think IBM is a "major tech companie" in the modern lingo

Hard to argue IBM is bigger

I'm factoring in their legacy and history

i.e. since they're older they're bigger

Microsoft is now 20x bigger than IBM in terms of market cap.

the only way to settle this is to sum the market cap of both companies over their entire history while adjusting all values for inflation

keep in mind that IBM[0] is over a hundred years old, and microsoft isn't even half of that [0]

[0] wikipedia

The only way to settle this once and for all, is an arm wrestle between Arvind Krishna and Satya Nadella.

that would not settle it "once and for all"

it would merely settle "for now" becuase as soon as either of them get succeded you will have to repeat the contest

This could be a product of your own PoV & history with IBM. Not many consider IBM's legacy noteworthy, they became complacent and got beat out the market.

You can make up whatever you want, that doesn't mean it's reality. I guess Zildjian, the cymbal making company is bigger than amazon, apple, microsoft, netflix, facebook and IBM, since it was founded in 1623.

older and bigger are not synonyms. IBM is not bigger than Microsoft today. the past is irrelevant for this conversation.

Not after the Redhat acquisition.

I don't think IBM is something that comes to mind when people are talking "Major tech companies" anymore.

They ought to, considering they acquired Red Hat a while back.

The Red Hat deal was relatively small at $34B.

Microsoft has a market cap of $2.8 Trillion.

IBM is only at $146 Billion. But IBM still has a higher head count.

I mean, that's one way of viewing it, yes, but considering how influential they are in spaces other businesses are struggling in (free software), having a $34B market cap isn't shabby performance. IBM getting an easy-in to free software via a respected (by business, anyway) partner is a big opportunity, but they'd have to play their cards right and I can't think of the last big thing IBM was behind. They might be able to sell Red Hat to everyday people if they pair it with hardware and have reasonable pricing for personal or self-hosting support licenses. I'm not savvy enough on IBM's history to know if their current staff are good picks to develop a more complete product on top of RHEL, but I can see it having value and success if priced well. As I understand it though, both IBM and RH seem more interested in cloud stuff.

You'd have to be blind to consider Red Hat not influential in its sphere.

Yes Red Hat is significant in its niche of enterprise server operating systems, but it's not in the same league as Microsoft as a company overall. Red Hat would typically be deployed on AWS or Azure where they rake in all the money.

While Microsoft makes $73B profit, IBM makes $2B profit.

So IBM/RH can't be big because the biggest makes more money...? We've had two exchanges and I'm still trying to understand why this matters.

This is very basic stuff. You are overthinking it.

Microsoft is in the group of "big five" tech companies (Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft). IBM is not in that group.

The reason for that is IBM is significantly smaller in terms of revenue and market cap and so on. IBM exists in a tier below the "big tech" level. This is how company sizes are measured.

Very simple. Not complicated.

Server operating systems are a small fraction of Microsoft's business.