IBM, every mention
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every year anyone David Rosenthal 199Ben Gilbert 101Steve Ballmer 65Morris Chang 17Brendan Eich 7Hamilton Helmer 5Howard Marks 3Howard Schultz 1Christina Cacioppo 1Ben Thompson 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where IBM comes up
Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 7:35 David Rosenthal I mean, the analogy here is it's almost as if at the dawn of the computer era itself, a single company like say IBM had hired every single person who knows how to code.
- ▶ 7:50 David Rosenthal Anybody who knows how to program works at IBM.
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:54:06 Ben Gilbert You had Xerox PARC and IBM's labs were sort of losing prominence, and Google's just sucking in all this generational heavy-hitter computer science architecture systems programmers from all of those.
- ▶ 3:02:07 Ben Gilbert IBM was dominant in mainframes and then lost their dominance in the PC era.
- ▶ 3:03:20 Ben Gilbert Famously, IBM made more revenue than Microsoft for a lot longer than people think.
The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired
- ▶ 7:56 Ben Gilbert Well, to contextualize all this, we want to go back almost all the way to the beginning, right around the time you joined Microsoft, and talk about Microsoft's relationship with IBM.
- ▶ 8:13 Ben Gilbert What was IBM in that era?
- ▶ 8:26 Steve Ballmer Uh, when I, when I get here and the company started obviously in 1975 and there were IBM computers.
- ▶ 8:35 Steve Ballmer And a couple others, but literally people would say there's IBM.
- ▶ 8:50 Steve Ballmer IBM and IBM did the mainframe and it did the software
- ▶ 8:54 Steve Ballmer and it did the service.
- ▶ 8:56 Steve Ballmer It did everything in computing, everything, everything.
- ▶ 9:30 Steve Ballmer And Dec had a nice business, but it was a lot smaller than IBM.
- ▶ 9:35 Steve Ballmer If IBM breathed, that was the direction the computer industry would go.
- ▶ 9:40 Steve Ballmer And IBM was the subject of an antitrust lawsuit.
- ▶ 9:53 Steve Ballmer So, 11 years they'd been living cause they were that big and bad and mighty.
- ▶ 10:01 Ben Gilbert What did they have to do?
- ▶ 10:05 Steve Ballmer It may be when they had to unbundle.
- ▶ 10:06 Steve Ballmer In fact, I think it was when they had to unbundle the operating system from the mainframe hardware so people could build IBM-compatible mainframes.
- ▶ 10:16 Steve Ballmer And then one day, shortly after I got here, some guys from IBM call and they say, hey, can we come see you?
- ▶ 11:17 Steve Ballmer And somehow IBM thought they could license CPM, even though it wasn't our product, they thought they could license it from us.
- ▶ 11:54 Ben Gilbert And so the licensing of Microsoft DOS, which didn't even exist when IBM approached you about licensing some things, is the single greatest business deal in history.
- ▶ 12:38 Steve Ballmer Cause we told IBM, no, no, we can take care of it.
- ▶ 14:29 David Rosenthal Like this is IBM we're talking about here.
- ▶ 14:31 Steve Ballmer But IBM wanted this.
- ▶ 14:33 Steve Ballmer IBM, they were experimenting with a different approach.
- ▶ 15:06 Steve Ballmer We'll get away from the IBM bureaucracy by taking this approach.
- ▶ 15:16 Ben Gilbert But what ended up happening after all these years, and I imagine it only took a few years to see it play out, was IBM sold a ton of IBM PCs, and DOS was the operating system.
- ▶ 15:45 Ben Gilbert Yeah, in the old world, IBM would have accrued that sort of platform benefit.
- ▶ 16:00 Steve Ballmer I should throw at you if you're curious, these things had something called the BIOS basic input output system, which was the lowest, lowest layer of firmware sort of first level software built into the hardware and IBM had its own BIOS and…
- ▶ 16:20 Steve Ballmer And so then the question is who was going to do an IBM compatible BIOS?
- ▶ 16:36 Steve Ballmer Uh, I don't remember whether they wrote their own, I, I think they had a compatible BIOS, but they were the first one to be IBM compatible.
- ▶ 16:43 Steve Ballmer There were plenty of people who ran MS-DOS who were actually not IBM compatible because they didn't do a compatible BIOS.
- ▶ 16:51 Ben Gilbert So IBM sort of thought
- ▶ 17:22 Steve Ballmer There were a couple of software companies that made packages for IBM mainframes, but almost everything was custom.
- ▶ 17:57 Ben Gilbert So it would have been counterintuitive or required too many mental hops to think, we're IBM.
- ▶ 18:15 Steve Ballmer I mean, just, you, you sort of can't blame them because there was nothing to build off of, but yeah.
- ▶ 20:18 Steve Ballmer Uh, there was IBM, man.
- ▶ 20:21 Steve Ballmer IBM was still the sun, the moon, and the stars.
- ▶ 20:47 Steve Ballmer If you looked at the enterprise, the enterprise was still IBM, IBM.
- ▶ 20:51 Steve Ballmer We used to say we had to hang on to IBM that if we ever let go, they might trample us.
- ▶ 20:57 Steve Ballmer We called them the bear, you know, you had to stay on.
- ▶ 21:29 Ben Gilbert When did you start to feel like were getting out from under the thumb of IBM?
- ▶ 21:39 Steve Ballmer So we've been staying with IBM.
- ▶ 21:43 Steve Ballmer Uh, they decided they wanted to build something that was sort of their operating system and sort of not.
- ▶ 21:52 Steve Ballmer We, and they would collectively build part of it.
- ▶ 21:58 Steve Ballmer They would build a value add layer that was a database and a.
- ▶ 22:06 Steve Ballmer We were gonna work on the operating system and what was called presentation manager, call that the graphical user interface, and they were gonna have rights equivalent to ownership in the code we wrote.
- ▶ 22:27 Steve Ballmer Most of them to South Florida, a couple of them to New York, leave on the Red Eye, the Delta Dash flight at around 11, get into Atlanta around five, get the flight to West Palm Beach at about seven, get in and be able to be at a meeting at…
- ▶ 23:04 Steve Ballmer And then they decided they were going to do the presentation manager piece in England.
- ▶ 23:26 Steve Ballmer And it was convoluted, and we did then keep, for, for speed of action, we kept going on Windows, which we had started.
- ▶ 23:46 Steve Ballmer No, Windows was our plan, and then they wanted, they, they wanted to do this new operating system, and we convinced them, you got to have a graphical user interface.
- ▶ 23:56 Steve Ballmer And we tried to sell them Windows, and they were resisting.
- ▶ 24:00 Ben Gilbert Okay, so it almost seems like you're humoring IBM at this point with, yeah,
- ▶ 24:47 Steve Ballmer Bill's very frustrated with IBM.
- ▶ 24:53 Steve Ballmer And so Bill's pushing windows hard, but we still suspected OS two could be the winner because it came from IBM, but we couldn't just like stop for three or four years.
- ▶ 25:10 Steve Ballmer So, we kept going with Windows, we kept going with OS two, and then May, 1990, they come along and shoot us.
- ▶ 25:23 David Rosenthal Wait, IBM shot you.
- ▶ 25:25 Steve Ballmer They divorced us.
- ▶ 25:26 Steve Ballmer They threw us out.
- ▶ 25:41 Steve Ballmer They had a new leader by then, a guy named Jim Cannavino.
- ▶ 25:49 Steve Ballmer We were still promoting windows and they, I mean, look, this was our first antitrust problem.
- ▶ 25:53 Steve Ballmer I don't know if you guys know this, is the FTC at the time thought we and IBM were working to, uh, divide the market because we had done some positioning.
- ▶ 26:06 Steve Ballmer We and IBM had done that because, and then they said, no, you guys are colluding.
- ▶ 26:37 Steve Ballmer I pick up the Wall Street Journal and I read that IBM's divorcing us.
- ▶ 29:11 Steve Ballmer I pick up the Wall Street Journal and I read that IBM's divorcing us.
- ▶ 29:21 David Rosenthal Basically they kicked you out, kicked Microsoft out, said we're, we're taking OS two in-house.
- ▶ 29:51 Ben Gilbert You see IBM is divorcing us.
- ▶ 30:12 Steve Ballmer oh my god, now we have to confront the bear.
- ▶ 30:21 Steve Ballmer Now, IBM, it's still.
- ▶ 30:24 Steve Ballmer We're still pipsqueak to IBM, and remember, we have no enterprise presence.
- ▶ 30:29 Steve Ballmer And IBM has all dominant enterprise presence.
- ▶ 31:17 Steve Ballmer IBM's going to stomp us like a, like a bug.
- ▶ 31:20 David Rosenthal You just took as a given assumption that if IBM wants to stamp out this happening, it's going to happen.
- ▶ 31:26 David Rosenthal So we, if we want a future, we got to play with them.
- ▶ 31:29 Steve Ballmer That's what, that's why we were quote, riding the bear the whole time because they'd stomp us out
- ▶ 31:34 Steve Ballmer and they'd divorce us in 90.
- ▶ 33:06 David Rosenthal As we understand it, you kind of had this realization at this point once the divorce happens, well, I'm going to go figure out how to do what IBM does, like you personally.
- ▶ 34:43 Steve Ballmer We had a development agreement with a company called Sybase to do the SQL database, because we were trying to figure out all these pieces IBM would have, uh, and we, we didn't have any of that.
- ▶ 36:53 Steve Ballmer I mean, look, we worked with other people the way IBM worked with us.
- ▶ 37:02 Steve Ballmer And it wasn't exactly a JDA joint development agreement, but you know, we worked with those guys the way IBM worked.
- ▶ 38:36 Steve Ballmer IBM had product still.
- ▶ 39:35 Steve Ballmer Because that's where IBM could pound, squish us like a bug.
- ▶ 40:03 David Rosenthal Pre-internet, yeah, is big, but like it's nowhere near IBM's market and the enterprise market.
- ▶ 50:35 Steve Ballmer Well, remember, by this time, we're not through our IBM competition, and we got Linux competition now on the docket, because Linux is competing with Windows Server.
- ▶ 55:53 Steve Ballmer IBM's still selling OS two.
- ▶ 57:25 Ben Gilbert We're still in this death grip for enterprise developers or this death fight against IBM, and yet there's now Linux and the web for these more sort of like independent or platform of the future looking developers and
- ▶ 1:16:43 Steve Ballmer Cause ThinkPad had, you know, IBM then, by then Lenovo had some higher end computers, but you never saw them.
- ▶ 1:31:31 Steve Ballmer You know, IBM was a one trick pony, Microsoft two to two and a half tricks.
Epic Systems (MyChart) · Acquired
- ▶ 41:10 David Rosenthal We talked about this a lot on our Microsoft episodes, but the critical thing about mini computers and especially for duty here and fledgling Epic was like a consumer wouldn't buy these things, but small businesses could and small…
- ▶ 1:17:50 David Rosenthal So they hold an RFP for a new EMR for all of Kaiser, one integrated system, and they pick IBM.
- ▶ 1:17:59 David Rosenthal IBM is going to come in and do this big four billion dollar project.
- ▶ 1:18:04 Ben Gilbert Nobody gets fired for buying IBM.
- ▶ 1:18:13 David Rosenthal So IBM comes in, and the project fails.
- ▶ 1:19:26 David Rosenthal So the IBM project fails, and maybe it's worth another word on that too.
- ▶ 1:19:31 David Rosenthal It's not like this doesn't impact the physicians and the staff at the hospitals, and poor performance for the hospital, as is in the case of this failed IBM implementation, massive detriment to the physicians.
- ▶ 1:52:54 Ben Gilbert At this point, no one gets fired for buying Epic the same way it used to be true about IBM.
- ▶ 3:02:50 Ben Gilbert There's so many costs that get paid out to the consultants that Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, Nordic, the post-implementation people, the optimization people, the headcount internally,
- ▶ 3:18:03 David Rosenthal Don't get fired for buying IBM.
TSMC founder Morris Chang · Acquired
- ▶ 1:55:42 Morris Chang Uh, uh, so let me tell you the IBM Qualcomm story.
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