The “Beyond IBM” diversification into telecom, AI and PCs (1985)

Once you have overtaken, what do you aim for?

The significance of this diversification lies in how Fujitsu faced the loss of direction that arrives after success. As long as it had a target to chase, the single-mindedness of overtaking IBM in mainframes was a source of strength. But once it had overtaken, that single-mindedness had nowhere to go. The “Beyond IBM” move of 1985 can be read as the attempt of a company that had lost its goal to set up a new axis of growth on its own. The strength of the era when it had something to chase, and the difficulty of the era after it lost that, lived side by side in the same company.

Yet to broaden is not the same as to bind together. The three pillars — telecommunications, computers and semiconductors — became the thickness of an all-round strength in good times and, in bad times, three simultaneous losses. The trouble was not that diversifying was itself a mistake, but that the next judgment — how to choose among the businesses it had spread into, and where to narrow them — never came with it. The breadth Fujitsu opened up in 1985 it would, twenty years later, narrow down once again. The question of what to aim for once you have overtaken went on appearing, again and again, in changing forms.