[phkahler]

>> His divisional heads always had the same answer. Microcomputers—home computing—were a fad. They were low-cost and low-profit. Let others scrabble around in the metaphorical dirt of home computing. The real money was in the markets that IBM’s divisions already dominated—selling vast mainframes and minicomputer systems to large businesses. Cary was even told to buy Atari, which by then had established itself as America’s home video game system of choice. That’s all home computers were good for: gaming.

This attitude was so short sighted. A friend of mines dad was using their Apple II for work-related spreadsheets and thought it was the greatest this ever. Not sure how IBM folks could not see this opportunity just because it was smaller scale than "what they did". 20 years later Intel seemed to have missed the mobile market due to a similar attitude.

[dkarl]

None of those division heads were trying to honestly assess the microcomputer market. They were trying to stay in harmony with opinion at their level and higher in IBM.

That's what you get at that level in a company that big. Anyone who is two or more levels from the top of the org chart and also two or more levels from the bottom lives in a reality that consists entirely of the attitudes and opinions of other people, weighted by each person's ability to impact their career. If they saw that the building they were in was on fire, their thought process would go something like: "Bob isn't here today because he's at that sales meeting. When he hears about the fire he'll downplay it as something minor, so I shouldn't evacuate or he'll think less of me. But Bob's boss Don is here. If Don evacuates and I don't, that might Don feel embarrassed and emasculated, and he'll take it out on Bob. So I need to evacuate if and only if Don evacuates. Bob won't mind me evacuating if Don does it. But Don's office is on the other side of that wall of approaching flames. Shit. My only chance is if he's in a meeting on this side of the building, so I can track him down and see what he's doing. Let me check his calendar real quick...."

[bee_rider]

A ridiculous and totally unrealistic example, and also the funniest description of office social politics I think I’ve ever seen.

[LaundroMat]

It's close to what Clayton Christensen describes as disruptive innovation (his examples were the steel industry and radio's): incumbents are forced higher up the chain by low quality competitors ("home computers are only good for gaming") that answer an unanswered need well enough. Once these competitors gain a foothold, quality improves and incumbents have less and less of a market.

[dbcurtis]

It’s exactly what CC was writing about. It is the way large organizations think unless someone has the courage to recognize that if they don’t start a new division, some little upstart will eat their lunch. Kodak laughed at the early, feeble digital cameras. Bell Labs sat on DSL because it would kill T1 revenue.

But man is it ever hard to execute. Andy Grove made every exec at Intel read Innovator’s Dilemma, but still it was hard to turn that ship.

[fragmede]

You can see the parallels between Kodak creating the first digital camera in 1975, and Google publishing Attention is all you need.

[akira2501]

> Not sure how IBM folks could not see this opportunity just because it was smaller scale than "what they did".

I encourage everyone to get a copy of the Hercules emulator and a copy of the "Turn Key 5" MVS distribution and spend a little time using it. The mainframe idea of "computing" and "running jobs" is so comprehensively different it's really hard to map any previous consumer computing experience into it. It's also just a lot of fun because of that.

The whole experience is centered around efficient use of machine resources while providing a comprehensive batch execution and scheduling system for centralized job execution in this environment. The level of accounting, reporting, repeatability, and job language features is actually something worthwhile to dive into.

In any case, I'm willing to bet that IBM's internal ideology is that end users wouldn't want to do the computing themselves, but would instead go to middle men who would would purchase computing either directly from IBM or as some form of "remote job entry" through a third party provider. To that end they were rapidly building out the infrastructure to do just that.

> Intel seemed to have missed the mobile market due to a similar attitude.

In both cases, they're still here, although Intel did a much better job of catching up to their past mistakes.

[p_l]

IBM on S/360 also did a lot of early interactive computing, not just batch processing.

What was common though then and now was renting computers.

Essentially, cloud computing.

[calrain]

This IBM viewpoint of PC's is well entrenched in enterprise IBM Mainframe support teams

I remember in 2010, having to present to a team of Mainframe techs at a bank about how we would be integrating an Identity solution (that ran on Windows servers) into their Mainframes.

They couldn't stop making comments about how useless Windows is and it's just a gaming platform. One guy ranted and raged so hard that he stood up and stormed out of the room.

I remember my Project Manager who was in the meeting looked at them and said 'Guys, we talked about this earlier'...

I can see where that mindset comes from, these guys have been drinking the IBM Kool-Aid for a long time

[ordu]

> Not sure how IBM folks could not see this opportunity just because it was smaller scale than "what they did".

Bureaucracy can be like that. Big bosses who might be really interested in increased profits rely on their subordinates to see the market, but subordinates are risk averse and don't want to change anything. Add corporate politics, people fighting not for innovations or for a market share but for promotions, and you'll get the picture.

It seems to be that they besides all that they were ideological, believed that size does matter and scorned on those who made computers smaller than theirs. Ideology means that people would have troubles to see anything that contradicts their ideology. Peer pressure, social desirability and all these things set up individual biases.

[II2II]

>> His divisional heads always had the same answer. Microcomputers—home computing—were a fad. They were low-cost and low-profit. Let others scrabble around in the metaphorical dirt of home computing.

Those views seemed to be relatively common. Just look at those home computer upstarts, many of which were scrambling to make business machines. Apple's follow ups to the Apple II were the Apple III and Lisa, both intended for business. Commodore seemed to have business computers on their plate most of the time. Tandy also pursued the business market. TI was a bit of an outlier in that they were into minicomputers before personal computers, and quickly jumped ship when they turned out to be low profit. Maybe it was different in Europe, but certainly not in North America.

I'm not entirely sure they were wrong either. A lot of companies rose then fell in the home computer market. IBM themselves haven't pursued the home market in decades at this point. Many, if not most, segments consolidated to the point that there was just one company with any meaningful market share. It could even be argued that the real money these days isn't in the hardware or software for the home market, but in the services they enable access to.

[tracker1]

They hamstrung and killed OS/2 similarly.

[garius]

Yup. I'll be covering OS/2 when I look at operating systems in this period.

The level of foot-shooting by IBM on that one was ridiculous.

[mhewett]

I was working at IBM in Boca Raton in 1990-91 when OS/2 was being developed. Wandering the hallways one afternoon, I passed by the OS/2 team where I overheard one engineer explaining to another engineer, "See, when you drag a file to the trash can, it should be a Move operation, not a Copy." I thought, OMG, this project is hosed. This was just a few months before it was supposed to be released.

The first release of OS/2 was a complete disaster. IBM was inundated with calls from customers who were having issues. They pulled every single person on the site into service as customer reps, without any training in OS/2! I was working on a UNIX project at the time and I was an Apple person - I had no clue how to help people with OS/2 or PCs but my manager did not like it when I tried to explain that. So I probably am listed somewhere as the worst OS/2 customer support person ever.

[CamperBob2]

Wandering the hallways one afternoon, I passed by the OS/2 team where I overheard one engineer explaining to another engineer, "See, when you drag a file to the trash can, it should be a Move operation, not a Copy."

But you didn't hear the other engineer respond, "No, no, you don't understand. This is an advanced prototype using functional programming. Moving the document to the trash would have side effects. Creating a copy and placing that in the trash can, however..."

[macintux]

Could IBM have succeeded given Microsoft’s betrayal? Or did Microsoft just give up on IBM ever delivering something?

[p_l]

Arguably they could have avoided Microsoft "betrayal" as well. Ultimately, Windows 3.0 was a skunkworks project of single engineer against the corporate decisions of Microsoft, and only when it was quite closer to complete did it start getting management buy-in.

Pretty sure for a long time it was "cloaked" as stop-gap solution, a continuation of the lesser-known "windows runtime embedded in application" option that some software shipped with.

[ghaff]

They had different goals. But it's not clear that Microsoft's goals--a largely hardware-independent OS--ever made sense for IBM. As it turned out, a more proprietary PC architecture didn't really make sense for IBM either but that was sort of beside the point.

[ghaff]

In the case of Intel, based on what I saw, they were just desperate/convinced to turn the x86 into a beachhead for mobile (but Flash will be the same!) but that ended up not making sense.

[insane_dreamer]

> This attitude was so short sighted.

Reminds me of Kodak.

[contingencies]

A friend of mine's father was the head of Digital[0] in Australia and later sent to Boston after being promoted. I distinctly recall speaking to him in around 1995 regarding Linux. He, along with I believe a large number of commercial Unix vendors, snubbed his nose at Linux suggesting it was a passing fad and would never challenge their "serious" Unix. This is interesting because Jon 'Maddog' Hall[1], then CTO of Digital (before it was acquired by Compaq in 1998, acquired in turn by HP in 2002) certainly did get it... I interviewed him once in Sydney circa '99 and had a good long chat once in Taiwan circa '01 after crossing paths by chance. He was traveling the world proselytizing Linux in shorts and flip-flops, had a firm belief in embedded Linux changing the world (Android[2] wasn't released until nearly a decade later in 2008), but was yet to announce he was gay (took another decade). Fast forward 30 years: nobody younger than 40 has practically even heard of the company, Linux is in every household, and the very idea of a commercial Unix a joke.

Furthermore, in perfectly delicious irony, IBM's own modifications to Linux[3] to support the allocation of workloads to its giant server hardware have enabled the popularization of containers, further reducing demands for server equipment, increasing portability between desktop and server environments, and substantially drawing down the cost of provisioning for cloud services - the arch rival to traditional mainframe mentality. Today, in a world awash with dirt cheap and ever-present processing power and storage, as well as recently unimaginable levels of connectivity, we stand almost at the point where the term "server" itself has become an anachronism and consumption-oriented devices draw consumers toward "services" (often as paid for subscriptions).

IMHO some industries which will look nothing like today's version in 30 years' time: food, oil, transport, construction, clothing, health, and education. Carpe diem.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Hall_(programmer) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system) [3] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

[phone[phone]]

> Not sure how IBM folks could not see this opportunity just because it was smaller scale than "what they did"

They thought it was a fad - that centralized systems (coincidentally, the machines they made) would be the computing platform that people would pay-per-minute/pay-per-hour/pay-per-month to access remotely. They wanted to be an information utility - a supplier to all - instead of selling a small, low margin box for one-time revenue.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

[folsom]

So you are saying that they were too far ahead of their time.

[phone[phone]]

Sure, we can go with that

[jhoechtl]

Are you talking about Microsoft Azure?

[phone[phone]]

No but thanks for play

[kragen]

google, fecebutt, amazon, and azure seem to be doing okay with centralized systems providing continuing revenue

[phone[phone]]

I didn't say the model was wrong - I was just saying there were focused on it

[kragen]

it's true, they were