IBM

“I think we did the first internet bank with first interstate bank, and we did first bill payments.”

“Every technology company either goes bust or lives long enough to become next generation's IBM.”

“I would say public cloud is one of them, candidly, that we missed. I would actually turn around and say, despite inventing the IBM PC, client server was another one that we missed.”

“As opposed to creating building blocks, we wanted to create solutions in verticals. That I think is a mistake as technology shows in the beginning.”

“We went too quickly, and we wanted to make a monolithic application. Mistake number one. Mistake number two, we picked a domain, which is perhaps the hardest of them all, which is health. Mistake number three, how many IBMers sell to doctors, and how many IBMe…”

“We are not going to be a hyperscaler, which was two of the four you mentioned, and we're not a foundation model provider.”

“After year two, we were definitely getting a return that was 10 X compared to what we were spending.”

“And now at year four we'll be I think over five billion from a baseline of 22 spent. So that's not an incremental five over last year. That's a incremental saving compared to our year-end 22 spending.”

“Our software developers are probably 40% more productive today than they were two years ago. So I'm not saying it's one month, over two years, they're 40% more productive.”

“We actually tripled our college level entry hiring this year. Tripled compared to last year.”

“If I take all the verbal promises, and if you say there's a 125 gigawatts of AI data centers that are going to come online in the next two to three years, that's the eight to 12 trillion of CapEx in total. Not in one year, in total. That is where I come to. I …”

“So, and I don't think in a commodity world, there probably isn't space for a dozen foundation models. Is there space for three or four? Probably. But since there's a dozen being run after globally, it tells you that They're not all going to work out.”

“Mythos didn't find anything that other models didn't and couldn't find.”

“We're pretty sure that in another month or two, we'll be at double that range, which means you can solve trypsin.”

“Two, we were About 20% software in 2019. We are now about 45%.”

“IBM is still around because they went and bought Red Hat and HashiCorp, and now they're buying Confluent.”

“I don't think the IBM brand is that relevant anymore in terms of like evoking an emotion and people to go use their products. But as a business, it's going to be awesome.”

“The entropic sale force in five years will look like the Oracle sales force, the Microsoft sale force, and the IBM sale force, 50 years ago”

“And it's, it is harder now. I don't think we can, I don't know that we can really go out, you know, 10 or 20 years ago. By the way, I think we deluded ourselves earlier, because I think if you ask people about the moat around, you know, IBM, or, you know, some…”

“IBM agreed to Thirty million dollars on signing the contract and another thirty million dollars on shipping and then royalties on every copy they ship. A total investment of sixty million, which is three times how much Ross Perot put in and a windfall that bro…”

“Years later, he confided in Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull That he had learned a lesson from the collapse of the IBM deal. Never overplay your hand.”

“The ad is, the slogan of the title of the ad is, it's an IBM ad. It says an IBM electronic calculator. This is before it was called a computer. It's an electronic calculator. It's the size of a fridge. It's like having a 150 extra engineers.”

“It took three and a half years to actually build the product and convince anybody to buy it. But then as soon as they started to buy, Silicon Graphics bought it, Hewlett Packard bought it, AT&T, IBM, right?”

“For 30 plus years, almost every conversation I have fits that structure. It's a habit. Anybody I ever meet, that is how I will structure a conversation.”

“Sales can be a trained skill. I sat next to very introverted people. Who were exquisite salespeople. I sat next to people who I considered to be pretty average horsepower. Very strong salespeople. I sat next to a very good looking, very charming people who cou…”

“If IBM had invented AI, you can bet it would not be like this. And it would be like a bajillion dollars, and only like the top companies could use it, and they would be using it in the weirdest, most uninteresting ways.”

“We, I had a team of four people, that was it, and we did one outside contractor that helped us, And other teams, IBM, Microsoft, others that bidded, had these huge teams bidding this thing, and they kept saying, you guys can't win it.”

“Unless it gets its shit together and makes great agents, it's another IBM.”

“The simplest thing is you also don't get promoted for buying IBM. And this is the same thing applied to, you know, Salesforce and all of these companies now. They're all like safe choices.”

“People were on MIPS and then one day the reality was IBM was selling more MIPS for fewer dollars every year. And didn't even realize it. And they were still pricing their mainframes by MIPS until it got pointed out to them that they were on a decreasing curve …”

“Where we were coming up with, like, pretty high overhead, and this was actually at Netflix, and it took us about, you know, maybe a couple of weeks to resolve it, and it actually turned out to be a JVM bug because they were using IBM's JVM versus Sun's JVM, an…”

“They were in the mid-eighties, they were 80% of the market capitalization of the entire tech industry, right? There's nothing even close to that.”

“How do you tell when brand is really starting to matter either competitively at all, or maybe a moat as opposed to just the identity of the thing, like a handle of the thing is when customers are making buying decisions because of it. It doesn't have to be the…”

“And when he came to India, he had a job offer from IBM at that time. But then J.R.D. Tata, who was the chairman of the Tata Group at that time, persuaded Ratan Tata to join the Tata Group.”

“They they're changing their CDN and they want to become big because they kind of lost the race early in the days, even though they're a huge company.”

“The public quantum companies, again, are not the leaders. You know, from my perspective, the leaders in quantum would be Google, IBM, and then the Honeywell quantum”

“You went to IBM for five years. We're never talking. I'm never recruiting you. Not because you're not a good rep, because by that move, I know what I need to know. You're done with, you don't want to do the heavy lifting anymore.”

“If you're a fighter, the only way up is through the top fighters in your division. So we picked fights with Microsoft and IBM because they're the ones we had to beat to reach the top. By constantly measuring ourselves against the two top heavyweights, we const…”

“The thing that people don't understand, this is even truer, the bigger enterprise sales you go, the more this is true, is that companies have budgets, they have resources, and they will put those into buying products But only if they can trust the outcome. Thi…”

“It was the first company to ever hit a hundred billion dollar market cap, which also blew my mind.”

“And inside the IBM PC, None of the chips were made by IBM, right? And none of the disk drives were made by IBM. The power supply wasn't made by IBM.”

“The role of IBM has been played by Microsoft. They set this Viper in motion, and they've allowed it to exist, and in one sense for a while it looked like Microsoft got a good deal because they got access to OpenAI's technology early on, and they got a little b…”

“IBM in the mid-eighties was 80% of the market capitalization of the entire tech industry.”

“My big mistake was not getting more and more involved with the PC back then, but I got a good education.”

“Now Microsoft, a company with seven million dollars in annual sales, had fewer than 40 employees, and was about to go into business with IBM, an international giant with revenues approaching thirty billion dollars a year.”

“IBM started their campus three, four years back. Their plan to recruit hundred people within a year as a pilot project. But within a year, they could recruit more than 1000 youth from state of Kerala.”

“Now IBM has established the first Gen AI Innovation Campus in Kuchy.”

“If you are giving all incentives to a garment industry, 10,000 people are working there. Average salary is 10,000 rupees. That means one 20 crore per annum. If I am giving a big IT company like IBM or ACL or Cognizant or any other companies, 3000 people is wor…”

“So we saw this thing where IBM fired all these people because it thought they could replace their jobs with AI and then had to hire them all back, had to hire like a ton of people back. Maybe not the exact same people, not doing the exact same things, but for,…”

“Even though I would largely say Dropbox looks like a failure from the outside, like, or to me, from my point of view of like, they haven't really done much. They make a lot of money. And so it's a successful business, you know, just like IBM somehow is still a…”

“Thomas Watson, senior who founded, founded IBM, the guy who founded IBM. He founded IBM in his forties. In his thirties, he was convicted by the federal government of antitrust. He was, like, convicted of antitrust violations for running his previous company, …”

“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 …”

“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…”

“And it was basically a complete failure and was sold for parts, right? And cost a lot of money to IBM, including the CEO.”

“The smartphone was not a new creation in 2007. The first smartphone actually came out. If you trace it all the way back, it came out in 1982. But IBM actually released something that actually looks a lot like an iPhone in 1987.”

“The greatest business failures often come from not playing the game poorly, but from continuing to excel at games that no longer matter.”

“Almost every single major open source company has had a giant, ah, institutional backer. IBM was the biggest funder of Linux in the nineties as a counterbalance to Microsoft. And the biggest funders of all the open source browsers are Apple and Google with Web…”

“We introduced our first brand name computer. So now he's not just souping up other machines. He's making his own. Okay. It was 795 dollars. If you got the same configuration from IBM, you would have to pay between 1525 hundred dollars.”

“So in 1987, IBM's market cap was a hundred billion dollars. It was the first company to break the hundred billion dollar market cap threshold, which was surprising to me. I didn't know that. And it was the most valuable company in the world.”

“In 1998, with over twelve billion in sales, we surpassed IBM and Apple to become the second biggest PC company in the world. Only Compaq now stood above us, and we had them in our sights.”