IBM had its worst trading day since the dot-com bubble burst
It’s Blue Monday... or it certainly was for IBM yesterday, as the stock suffered its biggest one-day drop since 2000, when the technology company’s shares tanked amid the wider bursting of the dot-com bubble.
Big Blue wound up in the big red, shedding more than 13% by yesterday’s close, fueled by an Anthropic blog post detailing Claude Code’s ability to automate modernization of Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL) code.
COBOL’s ubiquity and antiquity, as the language will celebrate its 67th birthday in September, makes it a pretty big deal — and a pretty big pain — not least for IBM, which is behind most of the mainframe computers that run the language, per Bloomberg.
IBM hit back with its own blog post yesterday outlining that the value its core mainframe computer business delivers isn’t dependent on a single language like COBOL or Java, but on the platform itself. The company also highlighted Watsonx, its own AI tool suite, which has COBOL modernization capabilities.
COBOL’s ubiquity and antiquity, as the language will celebrate its 67th birthday in September, makes it a pretty big deal — and a pretty big pain — not least for IBM, which is behind most of the mainframe computers that run the language, per Bloomberg.
IBM hit back with its own blog post yesterday outlining that the value its core mainframe computer business delivers isn’t dependent on a single language like COBOL or Java, but on the platform itself. The company also highlighted Watsonx, its own AI tool suite, which has COBOL modernization capabilities.
