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Microsoft. Since the PC had commodity innards, it took no time at all for newcomers, including Compaq and Taiwan’s Acer, to plug them into cheaper “IBM-compatible” computers, or clones. IBM found itself slugging it out with a slew of upstarts while Intel and Microsoft ran away with the profits and grew into titans. Big Blue was in decline, falling faster than most people imagined. And in 1992, the vast industrial behemoth stunned the business world by registering a $4.97 billion loss, the largest in U.S. history at the time. In the space of a decade, a company that had been synonymous with cutting-edge technology now looked tired and wasteful, a manufacturing titan ill-suited to the Information Age. It almost went under.
    A new chief executive, Louis V. Gerstner, arrived in 1993 and transformed IBM. He sold off or shuttered old manufacturing divisions and steered the company toward businesses based on information. IBM did not have to sell machinery to be a leader in technology, he said. It could focus on the intelligence to run the technology—the software—along with the know-how to put the systems to good use. That was services, including consulting, and it led IBM back to growth.
    Technology, in the early ’90s, was convulsing entire industries and the new World Wide Web promised even more dramatic change. IBM’s customers, which included virtually every blue-chip company on the planet, were confused about how these new networks and services fit into their businesses. Did it make sense to shift design work to China or India and have teams work virtually? Should they remake customer service around the Web? They had loads of questions, and IBM decided it could sell the answers. It could even take over tech operations for some of its customers and charge for the service.
    This push toward services and software continued under Gerstner’s successor, Samuel J. Palmisano. Two months after Charles Lickel came back from Poughkeepsie with the idea for a
Jeopardy
computer that could play
Jeopardy
, IBM sold its PC division to Lenovo Group of China. That year IBM Global Services registered $40 billion in sales, more than the $31 billion in hardware sales and a much larger share of profits. (By 2009, services would grow to $55 billion, nearly 60 percent of the company’s revenue. And the consultants working in the division sold lots of IBM software, which registered $21 billion in sales.) Naturally, a
Jeopardy
computer would run on IBM hardware. But the heart of the system, like IBM itself, would be the software created to answer difficult questions.
    A
Jeopardy
machine would also respond to another change in technology: the move toward human language. For most of the first half-century of the computer age, machines specialized in orderly rows of numbers and words. If the buyers in a database were listed in one column, the products in another, and the prices in a third, everything was clear: Computers could run the numbers in a flash. But if one of the customers showed up as “Don” in one transaction and “Donny” in another, the computer viewed them as two people: The two names represented different strings of ones and zeros, and therefore Don ≠ Donny. Computers had no sense of language, much less nicknames. In that way, they were clueless. The world, and all of its complexity, had to be simplified, structured and spoon-fed to these machines.
    But consider what hundreds of millions of ordinary people were using computers for by 2004. They were e-mailing and chatting. Some were signing up for new social networks. (Facebook launched in February of that year.) Online humanity was creating mountains of a messy type of digital data: human language. Billions of words were rocketing through networks and piling up in data centers. Those words expressed what millions of people were thinking, desiring, fearing, and scheming. The potential customers of IBM’s clients were out there