Samuel Palmisano recently spoke at the Computer History Museum about the history of IBM. As CEO of that company, he's in the unique position of, likely, being the only person within all of IBM to see the entire picture. It is a massive company, you know, with fingers in just about every business computing pie on the planet. But it wasn't always about pie, according to Palmisano's talk at the CHM. Sometime ago, there was cheese too.
Consider the companies that defined over the past half-century… the mainframe, minicomputer, PC and Internet eras. Most of these firms are gone or absorbed. Burroughs, Univac, DEC, Data General, Wang, Prime, Compaq, Sun, Silicon Graphics, Tandem, Apollo. The list could go on.
So, in the face of that, what has enabled IBM to survive and thrive?
People who are familiar with our history are often struck not merely by our longevity… but with the fact that we have continually changed. As we see in "Revolutions," IBM began by making punched-card tabulators. What we don't see here is that we also made clocks, scales… and cheese slicers!
I'm told they were really good cheese slicers.
It's an odd bit of history, that. And yet, still, IBM remained focused on business. Are there other reasons for IBM's success and staying power? Yep. R&D.
So you might say, "Wow, you haven't done the same thing for 100 years." That's one way of looking at our history.
Another view is that we've been doing exactly the same thing for a century. And that, I would offer, is the first lesson from our first century.
To put it very simply: This enterprise has always moved to the future. Continual forward movement is, in fact, inherent in IBM's value proposition, our business model. The frontier of what is truly innovative keeps moving… and that compels us not to sit still.
It is a constant reminder never to define ourselves by the things we make, no matter how successful they are today.
Time has taught us how essential this balance is — between what changes and what endures… how it can go wrong… and how we have to continually revisit and re-contextualize it for new generations.
We've thought about many dimensions of this balance between change and continuity this year. I'd like to share three that are especially relevant to our industry:
First, the importance of the 'and' in R and D.
We talk about R and D — and sometimes we forget the 'and.' They are different.
As "Revolutions" reminds us, our industry depends on advances in basic science. Indeed, you could say that the fundamental purpose of the Information Technology industry is to create economic value from the discoveries of science.
We see this again and again here at the Computer History Museum. The truly big breakthroughs in IT that came from deep research. In Bell Labs, in Xerox PARC, in IBM Research, in universities like MIT, in institutions like Lawrence Livermore.
Focus, and R&D. That's the secret. There are two more aspects of that balance, Palmisano mentions, but I'll let you read his whole speech for yourself,
through this link.