The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 27 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Chang: Co-developing tech with senior partners destroys internal R&D capability
“The company that co-developed something with them will send its engineers to IBM, you know. And when we do that, we lose our ability to develop our own process. We'll have to depend on this co-development thing.”
Chang: TSMC rejected IBM co-development deal that UMC accepted and regretted
“So we declined without having to think about it at all. We declined the IBM office. And IBM, in fact, was quite angry, you know. I mean, they thought we're still a small Taiwan backward place, you know. It's a Taiwan company, and they are going to pick IBM. So…”
The Microsoft-IBM PC partnership was tech history's most important deal
“I think you can make a very strong argument, the single most important deal ever done in the history of technology.”
Microsoft's Altair BASIC was the first commercial software product ever sold
“This is the first time software has ever been sold. Other than the IBM accounting machinations to protect themselves from antitrust, which was just accounting, nobody had ever sold software before. This is the first time.”
Ballmer: Microsoft's first antitrust inquiry came from FTC over IBM collusion
“This was our first antitrust problem. I don't know if you guys know this, is the FTC at the time thought we and IBM were working to divide the market because we had done some positioning. What's windows good for? What's always too good for? We and IBM had done…”
Microsoft used IBM for demand creation and PC clones for value capture
“Microsoft used IBM to generate demand for their software, and then they used every other PC manufacturer to capture the value. That all that demand created.”
New tech generations shift value chain power from hardware to OS
“A new technology generation, when something becomes possible and opens up a new market, It enables a shift in the point of integration in a value chain. The old value chain of IBM, if you shipped the mainframe, you had all the power. But in this new world of P…”
Ballmer: Microsoft initially charged fixed fees before switching to per-unit licensing
“We didn't charge for the operating system on an ongoing basis. We charged for it one time. If you got a new version, we charged another time and we did the same thing for basic and everything else because At the time, you could think we were like a substitute …”
Microsoft retained full non-exclusive licensing rights to DOS from IBM
“Microsoft retained the rights To own DOS and to own their languages and license it and them to anyone else they wanted at any price on any terms.”
Microsoft surpassed IBM in market capitalization in January 1993
“January, 93, the crowning moment, it happens, Microsoft passes IBM in market cap”
Microsoft did not pass IBM in annual revenue until 2015
“Microsoft would not eclipse IBM in revenue, you mentioned market cap, David, but in revenue until the year 2015.”
IBM paid Microsoft a $430,000 fixed fee for DOS with no royalties
“IBM paid Microsoft 75,000 dollars for testing and consultation. 45,000 dollars for DOS. 45. And 310,000 dollars for an array of sixteen-bit language interpreters and compilers. So all told, bundled together, that is 430,000 dollars fixed that IBM paid Microsof…”
Digital Research missing the IBM PC OS deal was a historic blunder
“What is clear is, however it goes down, this is one of, if not the biggest Business blunder in history”
Future Renaissance CEO Peter Brown spearheaded IBM's Deep Blue project
“Specifically, IBM's Deep Blue chess project of the time had come out of this group, and Peter Brown there was the one that actually spearheaded the project.”
Morris Chang raised Texas Instruments' IBM chip yields to 20% in four months
“After about four months, he gets the yields at the TI plant up to 20%. So twice as good as the first party line at IBM.”
In the late 1960s, every computer user wrote their own software
“There was no package software that you bought. The software that IBM was selling was the operating system to make the machines actually function, and it was the programming languages that you could then Program on, but you weren't clicking around and using Exc…”
IBM and Microsoft officially dissolved their OS/2 partnership by late 1990
“By the end of 1990, the Microsoft IBM divorce is official. IBM takes full control of OS two development back from Microsoft. Microsoft ceases involvement.”
Compaq reached $111 million in revenue in its first year
“They start the company in 1982, and within the first year, they do a hundred and eleven million dollars of revenue of selling IBM PC clone hardware.”
IBM unbundled hardware and software in 1968 amid antitrust scrutiny
“But an important thing that was also happening this year, in 1968, was that IBM was undergoing some antitrust scrutiny over that huge bundle that I just told you about. I mean, doesn't it smell like antitrust? They do everything from the hardware to the softwa…”
DEC priced the PDP-1 at $120,000, far below IBM mainframes
“So the first deck machine, when it comes out, the PDP one a few years before this time, it was priced at a 120,000 dollars. So like an order of magnitude, maybe two below a system that you would buy from IBM.”
IBM's market cap in 1980 was $34 billion
“Thirty four billion dollars. That was the most valuable company.”
IBM sold 500,000 PCs within two years of launch
“They sell 13,500 IBM PCs within the first couple months after they announce it. Over the next two years, they sell half a million of them.”
IBM mandated the Project Chess team to ship a PC within one year
“IBM leadership tells this team in Boca They have to ship the PC to customers within one year.”
Microsoft's 30-person staff outnumbered IBM's entire Project Chess team
“The Microsoft team of 30, which the whole company of Microsoft pivots to, like, work on the IBM PC Partnership is bigger than the project chess team in Boca.”
Eich: MicroUnity Made a Fortune Suing IBM, Qualcomm, and Broadcom
“MicroUnity, you probably haven't heard of, but it's got a lot of patents, and it's successfully litigated them from 20 years ago to maybe 10 years ago. I forget when they ran out of steam. I think it, Just made a ton of money off suing everybody. IBM, Motorola…”