The recent purchase by IBM of Lotus is a continuation of a trend of the past in which IBM holds back from big commitments to commercialization in emerging technology sectors until there is clear evidence of the "Business Case". Part of the root cause problem is that executives at IBM are constantly being presented with good ideas and excellent technology. They need "proof" of the opportunity to differentiate it from many others.

The following conversation with Larry Hartweg (with IBM at he time) may prove insightful:

Some IBM people argued against IBM's rapidly- developed, non-EBCDIC, ASCII PC back in the late Eighties. They felt it was a knee-jerk reaction using someone else's hardware (Intel) and someone else's software (Microsoft) that would create a clone commodity market in which IBM could not compete effectively. No IBMer could mount the business case required to develop their own superior microprocessor and workstation operating system. The mainframe bigots laughed at almost every business case that appeared. Objections to the PC were suppressed, and today's extensive clone marketplace was the ultimate result. The NY Times Prescription For An Ailing IBM offers the following advice to people who love main- frame dinosaurs: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Wild ducks and strategic acquisitions might work.

Thomas J Watson Jr. said:

"My MOST IMPORTANT CONTRIBUTION TO IBM was my ability to pick ... sharp, scratchy, harsh, almost unpleasant guys (like Andy Heller) who see and tell you about things as they really are. If you can get enough of them around you and have patience enough to hear them out, there is no limit to where you can go."

Near the end of his career as IBM CEO, Thomas Watson Jr. was very concerned about the limitations of the huge bureaucracy he had created. He often said: "We need more wild ducks in IBM". NY Times agrees! Many bean counters and "caretaker" managers want to shoot down wild ducks.

By the end of the 1990's, IBM must remove the business case blinders that they wore throughout most of the 1980's. Their new workstation and network environments for the 1990's will require the largest software development effort that has ever taken place in computing technology. Applications MUST be irresistible to their customers with development cycle times that are 10% of conventional development times.

End users will design and implement their own interfaces with intelligent visual tools in minutes that used to take coders over a year to develop. The 90's technology has the potential to sell hundreds-of-billions of dollars of computing hardware in the next few years. So far, most bean counters are still blind to the business case. IBM shoemaker's children don't even know what their customers are pursuing.

Will IBM wait until someone else creates and exploits new technology (like Apple did with PCs, and KnowledgeWare did with CASE) and then make a knee-jerk entry into the new technology in the late 1990's?

Will IBM continue to make their 1980's mistakes in the 1990's, or have they learned their lesson? Will the IBM of 2001 be stronger or weaker than IBM in 1996? Current signs are hopeful but have any of the fundamental root causes changed?

IBM could not imagine the business case for OO technology when it was first commercialized at the beginning of the 1980's. To this day, they are still equivocal about their commercial success in the OO marketplace. They told their customers that they were going to support the OO industry standard with Taligent. Where is Taligent? Will VisualAge be a COBOL tool!? Where is their unconditional support for SmallTalk?

For your amusement, here is a parable about how the traditional product manager does a business case at IBM:

Once upon a time, there was a highway department in Mainframe City that claimed to be the best highway department in the land. Several concerned citizens wrote in to suggest that a bridge be built between Mainframe City and OOville, spanning rapidly-moving Technology River. The highway department eventually decided to see if there was justification for building such a bridge. They sent three men in a boat to SmallTalk Point, since it seemed the best place to span Technology River.

The men anchored their boat in the middle of the river and waited six months. No one tried to drive across the river at that point, so they concluded that there was no business case for the bridge. Their supervisor suggested that they tie a rope across the river and see if anyone tried to cross on the rope. A few people tried, but they fell into the river from exhaustion.

The highway department concluded that SmallTalk Point was unsafe. The Mainframe City highway department continued to claim to be the best highway department in the land, despite the large increase in helicopter flights across Technology River between OOville and Mainframe City. Concerned citizens from OOville looked out of their helicopter window from an elevated perspective of Technology River and sighed. They decided to construct a modern version of Mainframe City services in OOville.

A few years later, OOville changed its name to OO City and voted down a request from Mainframe City to build a bridge across the river. The progressive businesses and managers moved to the more-efficient OO City.

Inspired by Larry Hartweg and updated by Keith Cowan. This sounds like it coudl be the story of a lot of product managers, not just at IBM!

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