IBM's market share reportedly fell from ~50% (1969) to 37% (1982) during its antitrust suit, partly via deliberate price hikes to look less dominant

During the roughly 13 years United States v. IBM was pending (1969-1982), IBM's share of the computer market reportedly fell from about 50% to about 37%. Per "The Ghosts of Antitrust Past: Part 2 (IBM)" (Alec Stapp, Truth on the Market, 2020), this decline was achieved in part because IBM deliberately raised prices to appear less dominant while the case was live, only cutting prices again once the suit was dropped in 1982.

The claim-bearing passage in Stapp's post is not his own analysis — it is a block quote from Richard Epstein, "Beware of Populist Antitrust Law" (Forbes, Jan. 23, 2019), where the same three sentences appear verbatim (verified at both URLs, 2026-07-12). Epstein is a named legal scholar writing in his own column — closer to Tier 2 than the Tier 3 blog quoting him — but he attaches no citation to either the 50%/37% figures or the raise-then-cut mechanism, so the chain still terminates in an uncited assertion rather than a primary record.

Flag — [unverified-quant — needs primary]. Both the specific market-share figures (50% -> 37%) and the raise-then-cut pricing sequence are exactly the kind of number and mechanism claim the sourcing floor (00-meta/specs/sources.md) requires Tier 1-2 for — a blog's retelling of antitrust history is a lead to a primary record (DOJ trial exhibits, IBM's own filings, or a scholarly antitrust-economics treatment of the case), not a citable source for the figures themselves. The Epstein column the blog quotes does not discharge the flag: a statistic's primary home is the trial record or period market data (e.g. IDC figures), and Epstein cites neither. Verification is routed at question-verify-ibm-market-share-price-strategy-during-antitrust-suit.

This decline unfolds across the same suit whose dismissal is covered in claim-baxter-dismissed-ibm-case-same-day-att-breakup-finalized, and sits against the backdrop of John Cullinane's contemporaneous claim (recorded separately) that the antitrust case had little to do with what actually built the software industry — see claim-cullinane-called-ibm-unbundling-software-industry-origin-myth.