was OK.
Perfect.
When I started at IBM there was a dress code,
that was an informal oral code of white shirts.
You couldn't wear anything but a white shirt,
generally with a starched collar.
I remember attending my first class, and a
gentleman said to me
as we were entering the building,
"are you an IBMer?", and I said yes.
He had a three piece suit on, vests were of
the vogue,
and he said:
"could you just lift your pants leg please?"
I said what, and before I knew it he had lifted
my pants leg
and he said "you're not wearing any garters!"
I said what?!
He said "your socks, they're not pulled
tight to the top",
"you need garters." And sure enough I had
to go get garters.
IBM is like Switzerland
conservative, a little dull, yet prosperous.
It has committees to verify each decision.
The safety net is so big that it is hard
to make a bad decision
or any decision at all.
Rich Seidner, computer programmer and
wannabe Paul Simon,
spent twenty-five years marching in lockstep
at IBM.
He feels better now.
I mean it's like... getting four hundred
thousand people
to agree what they want to have for lunch.
You know... I mean it's how can I...
it's gonna be lowest common...
you know...
it's going to be, you know...
hot dogs and beans!
So ahm so what you gonna do?
So IBM had created this process and
it absolutely
made sure that quality would be preserved
throughout the process,
that you actually were doing what you set
out to do
and what you thought the customer wanted.
At one point somebody kind of looked at the
process to see well, you know,
what's it doing and what's the overhead
built into it,
what they found is that it would take at least
nine months
to ship an empty box.
By the late seventies, even IBM
had begun to notice
the explosive growth of personal computer
companies like Apple.
(commercial) the Apple 2, small inexpensive
and simple to use...
What's more, it was a computer business
they didn't control.
In 1980, IBM decided they wanted a piece
of this action.
There were suddenly tens of thousands of
people buying
machines of that class and they loved them.
They were very happy with them and they
were showing up
in the engineering departments of our clients
as machines that were brought in
because you can't do the job on your
mainframe kind of thing.
(commercial) JB wanted to know why I'm doing
better than all the other managers...
it's no secret...I have an Apple,
sure there's a big computer three flights down
but it won't test my options,
do my charts or edit my reports like my Apple.
The people who had gotten it were
religious fanatics about them.
So the concern was we were losing the hearts
and minds and give me a machine
to win back the hearts and minds.
In business, as in comedy, timing is everything,
and time looked like it might be running out
for an IBM PC.
I'm visiting an IBMer who took up the challenge.
In August 1979, as IBM's top management
met to discuss their PC crisis,
Bill Lowe ran a small lab in Boca Raton Florida.
- Hello Bob nice to see you.
Nice to see you again. I tried to match
the IBM dress code how did I do?
- That's terrific, that's terrific.
He knew the company was in a quandary.
Wait another year and the PC industry would be
too big even for IBM to take on.
Chairman Frank Carey turned to the
department heads and said:
"HELP!!!"
He kind of said well, what should we do,
and I said well,
we think we know what we would like to do if
we were going to proceed with our own product
and he said no, he said at IBM it would take
four years and three hundred people
to do anything, I mean it's just a fact of life.
And I said no sir, we can provide with product
in a year.
And he abruptly ended the meeting,
he said you're on Lowe,
come back in two weeks and tell me
what you need.
An IBM product in a year! Ridiculous!
Down in the basement Bill still has the plan.
To save time, instead of building a