Computing giant IBM became one of the most iconic companies in the United States largely thanks to its groundbreaking hardware, securing a torrent of patents that spanned the tech world, from big servers to tiny chips.

But after 10 straight quarters of sagging sales, the 103-year-old tech titan on Monday announced an unusual step: It will pay a Silicon Valley upstart $1.5 billion to take over the semiconductor business it helped pioneer.

It was the legacy giant’s latest attempt at sending its crumbling hardware business the way of one of its many inventions, the floppy disk, while refocusing on new tech goldmines such as data analysis and cloud computing.

But pushing away from its traditional bread and butter, those namesake “business machines,” has already stuck IBM with big growing pains. The firm’s disappointing results, including a 4 percent drop in third-quarter revenue, “point to the unprecedented pace of change in our industry,” IBM chief executive Ginni Rometty said Monday. “We have got to reinvent ourselves.”

In doing so, IBM is following the playbook of much of U.S. tech’s old guard. To conquer modern computing’s biggest growth industries, legacy tech giants are beating a hasty retreat from the hardware that made them household names.

Hewlett-Packard said this month it would split its growing enterprise division from its traditional lifeblood of printers and ink. And Microsoft has turned away from its slow-selling device division and toward software services and cloud computing.

“They have made a practice of shedding unproductive parts of their business,” Joseph Foresi, an analyst with Janney Montgomery Scott, said of IBM. “Hardware has become commoditized. The new technologies, like cloud, have become more favorable and have a better backdrop. It’s a necessary evil.”

But analysts said shedding the old moneymakers and thriving solely off the treasures of new industries may prove harder than it seems. “While the newer strategic areas are seeing significant growth,” Wells Fargo Securities analysts wrote of IBM Monday, “the traditional businesses are still declining at a faster pace. The results are disappointing.”

In a world where everyone can carry a computer in a pocket, the downfall of tech titans’ hardware offerings can seem hard to believe.

The firms are finding that hardware manufacturing, with its razor-thin profit margins, is more a drag on their earnings. Newer, nimbler worldwide competitors are increasingly able to build hardware such as semiconductor chips cheaply and at high volume, undercutting what they can sell.

IBM will offload its chip-making operations to Globalfoundries, a contract chip manufacturer in Santa Clara, Calif., which will continue to make processors for IBM systems.

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