During my early days at IBM I was amazed to find that as smart as people were at the company, too often they failed to realize that Hardware and Operating Systems didn’t generate the revenue for the company.

This sounds like blasphemy in a corporation known then for Hardware and Operating Systems but I stood by my convictions even today.  During the mid 80s one of my mentors and I had a late night debate.  Well actually I’d call it a full blown argument.  A new Engineering Workstation from IBM was about to be announced to the world.  My mentor was all puffed up about it and was asking me for my opinion being the target market was CAD/CAM professionals.  I looked at the announcement letter which contained all the specs, how many megaflops, RAM, disk size, access speed, and power requirements.  I looked for what came with it and what applications were going to run on it only to find nothing.  That’s right nothing.  The operating system wouldn’t be ready till a month or two after release, a complier was on the agenda but hadn’t even been started.  The basic fact was at announcement IBM was going to release this greatest of Workstations with little more than a Display, a System Case and a Power cord.

My mentor and colleague knew me for making my point the hard way most of the time.  So when I told him that the new system was non-competitive he took the bait to find out where I was coming from.  I told him that there were other products out there that were more cost efficient and economical for the job this product was capable of doing at this time.  He immediately launched into all the wonderfulness of the CPU speed, the Display resolution, and dozens of other specifications and asked what other competitor could compete with IBM and this Workstation? 

My answer was swift and puzzling to him.  Pep Boys, Sears, and J.C Penny are going to kill us!  Their products are ten times as efficient and cost thousands less.  He was shocked.  Sears doesn’t sell computers!  Are you nuts?

I continued with my justification for my pronouncement of doom with questions of him.  What CAD/CAM applications are available at the time of delivery or in the pipeline?  “None” he said quietly as he started to have a very uncomfortable feeling, like he was out in public without his pants on.  What application development tools are available? Another none was replied.  What Operating System and utilities will be delivered with it so it can do something? Sadly another none was echoed back.  Then I tell you that we’re going to get killed by the competition.  He responded that Sears, J.C. Penney and Pep Boys don’t make computers.  I had already done a bit of calculations on power consumption and heat transfer in the back of my head when I said neither is this.  What we have here is a very poorly design “Space Heater” your competition is not DEC or HP or SUN, its Sears and Pep Boys and they can produce a space heater like this for much cheaper and better efficiencies.