...Intel story:
So next year, Intel had to settle for competing against AMD. And even though the Intel paddlers (*rowers*, in a *canoe* race? Naah!) paddled much faster than the AMD ones, AMD still won by half a mile.
So Intel management hired a consulting company and paid them incredible amounts of money. They advised that Intel's paddlers were too weak; AMD's paddlers just got more work done with each stroke. To prevent losing to AMD next year, the paddling team's management structure was totally reorganized. Yadda, yadda ...
And next year, AMD won by a whole mile.
Then the Intel management gave a "High Performance" award to the steering managers and distributed the rest of the money they saved as bonuses to the senior executives.
The moral of the story: Chose your "plucky young contender" protagonists better next time, Gramps -- just because IBM used to be the Evil Empire back in your heyday, is no reason to pick today's Other Evil Empire (besides the Borg of Redmond) as the hero of your tale.
Especially not when A) IBM seems to fairly conclusively have mended their ways nowadays (your story has, in a sense, passed its sell-by date by about ten years or so), and B) the identity of the contender didn't really matter all that much to the story; you could easily have picked somebody else than Chipzilla.