Computing's early focus on speed for scientific calculations gave way to commercial applications, playing to the strengths of the small company that would become IBM. With a focus on technology, marketing, and perhaps a dash of monopoly, IBM climbed to market dominance and widespread admiration.
Spurred by ambitions to grow even larger, IBM's fortunes faltered. Lou Gerstner, an outsider and the former "Cookie Man" CEO of RJR Nabisco, pulled the company back from catastrophe. Unfortunately, his successors embraced financial schemes, ignoring the fundamental imperative of innovation. The pace of technology is unforgiving, and even a dominant company as IBM would soon discover this. The author pulls no punches in describing the company's fall from iconic to troubled.
The author, a long-time IBMer with a decorated technical background, provides deft storytelling with well-drawn portraits of the people and ideas that propelled computing forward. He deciphers the inner workings and import of each technology transformation. He also delivers a firsthand chronicle of IBM's lesser-known but very successful midrange and personal computers. The book is a compelling story of how IBM and computing transformed the world. Today, a decidedly smaller IBM struggles to regain relevance, let alone its former dominance. With AI and quantum computers poised to dramatically reshape the computing world, will IBM be part of the continuing story?
How does the book differ from the many existing books on IBM:
- > It tells the extraordinary story of IBM but within the context of the relentless forward march of computing technology beginning thousands of years ago with the abacus.
- > The reader will come away with a greater understanding of the technologies and strategies that were critical to the company's success.
- > It is an insider's account, with academic quality research and rigor, working with the cooperation of IBM. The central focus remains on IBM, a company so iconic in the 20th Century and so troubled in the 21st.
- > Where most IBM books treat the company as big mainframe computers and little else, the author reveals the lesser-known story of the smaller IBM, an upstart division with personal and midrange computers that grew into a $14 billion business.
Most importantly, the story pulls no punches. The author chronicles the failed financial strategies and missed technology waves that were the company's undoing.
The author is an IBM insider, having worked a wide range of technical, sales, marketing, and management roles. In this book, he has tapped into his "Top Gun" expertise to explain complex computing technologies in non-technical terms. The book is a very readable history that brings to life the outsized personalities that drove the many milestones in computing.During his years at IBM, he had the opportunity to do some writing. He managed the development of two significant technical books while contributing key portions. He also wrote many feature articles for the computing trade magazines. After retiring from the company, he started his second career as an author. His first book was an automotive history. Then, he turned his attention to researching this book. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College, which incidentally plays a significant role in this story.The impetus for this project began soon after he had read an extensive history of IBM. As he would learn in reading perhaps a hundred other books about the company, IBM emerged as a monolith whose only product was the mainframe. The author spent his entire career in the exciting, but lesser-known part of IBM that produced small and midrange computers. That IBM, if a separate entity, would have been the second largest computer company in the world, after IBM. That first book he read, a tome of over 700 pages, devoted less than a paragraph to this story. The book's author advised him that if he wanted his history revealed, he should tackle it himself. He accepted the challenge. The author placed the IBM story within the grand arc of computing progress. He wanted to weave in the principal drivers of this evolution, including technology advances, government investment, and societal changes. He tapped into his resources at IBM, who provided substantial support. The result is a balanced account, extolling the company's towering successes while putting its recent failures under a microscope. The book also brings the story up to 2025, with extensive treatment of cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and quantum computers.For more information, see the writer's website at www.williamcshaffer.com.
