The First Computer War - Betting the Store | 5

Business Wars

Wondery

History, Business, David Brown, Management

4.6 • 13.2K Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2018

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It’s 1961. Since his father retired 5 years earlier, Thomas Watson Jr pushed to modernize IBM from the top down. New management, new ideas, newer, faster, machines. The company has grown, employing 1,000 people, they’ve dominated the emerging computer market... and managed to frustrate the public all at the same time. IBM’s new technology is confusing and the only way out may be to create a Civil War, burning IBM from the inside out. Will they be able to agree, or will infighting cost them the entire company?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to Business Wars ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:04.6	Download the app today.
0:10.8	It is December 1961 at the New Englander Motor Hotel near Stamford, Connecticut.
0:17.1	The hotel is as unglamorous as the name sounds.
0:20.8	A spare roadside stop for highway travelers.
0:24.3	For the past eight weeks, it has hosted an odd group of guests.
0:28.6	A dozen top engineers and executives from IBM are stuck here in a kind of corporate house
0:35.0	arrest.
0:36.0	IBM is in trouble paradoxically because of its own wildfire success.
0:43.5	So IBM CEO Tom Watson Jr. orders the group to convene at this hotel.
0:49.6	He wants them to come up with a bold new strategy to create a whole new line of computers.
0:55.6	And he won't let them leave until they have a plan.
0:59.7	Two of the executives are John Hansstra, president of the General Products Division and Fred Brooks,
1:05.7	already a giant in the still embryonic field of software engineering.
1:10.5	Brooks and Hansstra are edgy and squaring off.
1:15.4	Hansstra, the hardware product guy, opens the conversation.
1:19.1	Look, my division should take the lead in developing any new machine.
1:23.6	He put out the 1401 in 1959 and it is now the best selling computer in the world.
1:29.3	No one else here can match that.
1:31.7	Brooks, the software engineer, knew this was coming.
1:34.9	You can't keep operating like a separate company.
1:37.8	You've been against a single corporate wide computer line from the start.
	...

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