If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years.
Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.
I was going to visit IBM for six months as a visiting scientist. Now, six months is a lot of time, so I came with a whole list of projects that I might want to work on.
Drugs are in every walk of life - doctors, lawyers, preachers, the guy who works for IBM, teenagers on the street, teenagers in school.
I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very well with it.
We think the managed security services opportunity is enormous and so we have been an active participant and probably the largest firm in this space outside of an IBM or EDS, which does large outsourcing contracts.
Every time we've moved ahead in IBM, it was because someone was willing to take a chance, put his head on the block, and try something new.
It's like when IBM drove a lot of innovation out of the computer industry before the microprocessor came along. Eventually, Microsoft will crumble because of complacency, and maybe some new things will grow. But until that happens, until there's some fundamental technology shift, it's just over.
Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation. They prevent innovation from happening.
People who feared IBM were wrong, ... Technology is ever-changing.
It's the first company to build the mental position that has the upper hand, not the first company to make the product. IBM didn't invent the computer; Sperry Rand did. But IBM was the first to build the computer position in the prospect's mind.
It's not easy to remember, but IBM was the computer industry when I was growing up. You loved 'em. You hated 'em. You knew what they were doing. They had set a standard for mainframes. They also set a standard for great sales focus and heavy product R & D.
Microsoft went into orbit because it had a booster rocket attached to it called IBM.
I firmly believe that IBM's size can be used to its advantage.
It was an impressive achievement, of course, and a human achievement by the members of the IBM team, but Deep Blue was only intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better.
IBM's long-standing mantra is 'Think.' What has always made IBM a fascinating and compelling place for me, is the passion of the company, and its people, to apply technology and scientific thinking to major societal issues.
We flew down weekly to meet with IBM, but they thought the way to measure software was the amount of code we wrote, when really the better the software, the fewer lines of code.
IBM Plus Reality Plus Humanism = Sociology.
The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC.
One thing the military does far better than business is train its own leaders. I can't go to IBM and hire a battalion commander. They don't have any.
IBM needed - an enormous sense of urgency.
The manuals we got from IBM would show examples of programs and I knew I could do a heck of a lot better than that. So I thought I might have some talent.
We can learn from IBM's successful history that you don't have to have the best product to become number one. You don't even have to have a good product.
Some people speak of the Akashic Records as if they were on an IBM mainframe that's out there somewhere near the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game; it is the game.
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