Ibm Quotes

I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company.

When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.

IBM experimented with adding Urban Dictionary data to its artificial intelligence system Watson, only to scrub it all out again when the computer started swearing at them.

(Thomas J. Watson Sr. of IBM followed the same rule: “I’m no genius,” he said. “I’m smart in spots—but I stay around those spots.”)

NOTHING APPLIES, I print with the magnetized IBM pencil. What does apply, they ask later, as if the word "nothing" were ambiguous, open to interpretation, a questionable fragment of an Icelandic rune.

A while back, I came across a line attributed to IBM founder Thomas Watson. If you want to achieve excellence, he said, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.

Goods in any storehouse are useless until somebody takes them out and puts them to the use they were meant for. That applies to what man stores away in his brain, too. —THOMAS J. WATSON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF IBM

I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game—it is the game.

Watson, Sr., was running IBM, he decided they would never have more than four layers from the chairman of the board to the lowest level in the company. That may have been one of the greatest single reasons why IBM was successful.

In the past, pure scientists took a snobbish view of business. They saw the pursuit of money as intellectually uninteresting, suited only to shopkeepers. And to do research for industry, even at the prestigious Bell or IBM labs, was only for those who couldn't get a university appointment. Thus the attitude of pure scientists was fundamentally critical toward the work of applied scientists, and to industry in general. Their long-standing antagonism kept university scientists free of contaminating industry ties, and whenever debate arose about technological matters, disinterested scientists were available to discuss the issues at the highest levels.

These guys are fakes. All they've got on their minds is impressing the new girls with the big words they're so proud of, while sticking their hanse up their skirts. And when they graduate,they cut their hair short and march off to work for Mitsubishi or IBM or Fuji Bank. They marry pretty wives who've never read Marx and have kids they give fancy names to that are enough to make you puke. Smash what educational-industrial complex? Don't make me laugh!

mandelbrot changed the way ibm's engineers thought about the cause of noise. bursts of errors had always sent the engineers looking for a man sticking a screwdriver somewhere.

recent IBM poll of fifteen hundred CEOs identified creativity as the number-one “leadership competency” of the future.

And Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, said in 1943, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.

The two directions of thinking are the outward direction toward your material equipment which gives you your resources, and the inward direction toward your mental equipment, which gives you your resourcefulness.

One reason alone is enough for today, and that reason lies in the national misconception of what constitutes education. All of your lives you have been trained to believe that your mental equipment consisted of learning how to memorize a multitude of facts. This is what I call parroting a man. To my mind, this inadequate concept of education is the crime of the age.

A promising junior executive of IBM was involved in a risky venture for the company and managed to lose over $10 million in the gamble. It was a disaster. When Watson called the nervous executive into his office, the young man blurted out, 'I guess you want my resignation?' Watson said, 'You can't be serious. We've just spent $10 million educating you!

Скудность мысли порождает легионы единомышленников.

I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft.

The year before, 279,000 Apple IIs were sold, compared to 240,000 IBM PCs and its clones.

The colonel dwelt in a vortex of specialists who were still specializing in trying to determine what was troubling him. They hurled lights in his eyes to see if he could see, rammed needles into nerves to hear if he could feel. There was a urologist for his urine, a lymphologist for his lymph, an endocrinologist for his endocrines, a psychologist for his psyche, a dermatologist for his derma; there was a pathologist for his pathos, a cystologist for his cysts, and a bald and pendantic cetologist from the zoology department at Harvard who had been shanghaied ruthlessly into the Medical Corps by a faulty anode in an I.B.M. machine and spent his sessions with the dying colonel trying to discuss Moby Dick with him.

Jack quit his advertising job and devoted himself to the life of the pen. Or rather, to the life of the Remington, soon to be replaced with an IBM Selectric, with the bouncing ball that let you change the typeface. Now that was cool!

At IBM, a corporation that embodied the ideal of the company man, the sales force gathered each morning to belt out the company anthem, “Ever Onward,” and to harmonize on the “Selling IBM” song, set to the tune of “Singin’ in the Rain.

The I.B.M. machine has no ethic of its own; what it does is enable one or two people to do the computing work that formerly required many more people. If people often use it stupidly, it's their stupidity, not the machine's, and a return to the abacus would not exorcise the failing. People can be treated as drudges just as effectively without modern machines.

Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republi­can) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 198os, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages.

A billion hours ago, modern Homo sapiens emerged. A billion minutes ago, Christianity began. A billion seconds ago, the IBM personal computer was released. A billion Google searches ago… was this morning. —HAL VARIAN, GOOGLE’S CHIEF ECONOMIST, DECEMBER 20, 2013

IBM and other mainframe companies spent more money selling their products and serving their customers than they did in actually building their machines. They sold their computers to people who were actually going to use them, not to middlemen, and this market required good manners. Microcomputer companies sold equipment as if it were corn, in large quantities; they spent most of their money making things and competed not by being polite but by being aggressive.

By contrast Hobie lived and wafted like some great sea mammal in his own mild atmosphere, the dark brown of tea stains and tobacco, where every clock in the house said something different and time didn’t actually correspond to the standard measure but instead meandered along at its own sedate tick-tock, obeying the pace of his antique-crowded backwater, far from the factory-built, epoxy-glued version of the world. Though he enjoyed going out to the movies, there was no television; he read old novels with marbled end papers; he didn’t own a cell phone; his computer, a prehistoric IBM, was the size of a suitcase and useless.

Some research suggests that collecting vast amounts of data simply can’t predict rare events like terrorism. A 2006 paper by Jeff Jonas, an IBM research scientist, and Jim Harper, the director of information policy at the Cato Institute, concluded that terrorism events aren’t common enough to lend themselves to large-scale computer data mining.

… as I associated with more and more different types, I realized that to make it, you had to get along with almost everybody. If you dislike the people you work with, you’d better not show it. I learned that to be a good leader, I had to strike a delicate balance.

Человек эпической низости.

En lugares como IBM, que se especializa en mejoras cotidianas realizadas por equipos de ingenieros, esta es la forma preferida de entender cómo se produce realmente la innovación.

Drugs are in every walk of life - doctors, lawyers, preachers, the guy who works for IBM, teenagers on the street, teenagers in school.

Big Thinkers like IBM’s Watson are programmed and named to sound like men.

Hyperledger.org is a corporate open source Potemkin village of the sort IBM has long favoured: the illusion of an open project, with no “there” there.

IBM veteran and computer science professor Frederick Brooks argued that adding manpower to complex software projects actually delayed progress.

That was an all-purpose IBM 3070. It took up half a room and still did not have enough capacity to do all the jobs demanded of it.

Within IBM at that time, growing a beard without getting fired was an indisputable mark of technical genius. In

Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation.

el famoso ordenador de la película 2001: Una odisea en el espacio, que, según una leyenda urbana, lo habían llamado “HAL” porque eran las letras que precedían en el alfabeto a “IBM”.

The fashionable term now is “Big Data.” IBM estimates that we are generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, more than 90 percent of which was created in the last two years.36

I became a door-to-door IBM salesman in 1963, a job I had for six years. But most everyone thought it was a bad idea. Door-to-door salesmen were lower than used-car salesmen or attorneys.

– Наши дети становятся американцами. Они не читают по-русски. Это ужасно. Они не читают Достоевского. Как они смогут жить без Достоевского? На что художник Бахчанян заметил: – Пушкин жил, и ничего.

A billion hours ago, modern Homo sapiens emerged. A billion minutes ago, Christianity began. A billion seconds ago, the IBM personal computer was released. A billion Google searches ago… was this morning.

As an IBM document describing the Watson technology points out: “We have noses that run, and feet that smell. How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, but a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

It is 1958,” he began. “IBM passes up a chance to buy a young fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox was born, and IBM has been kicking themselves ever since.

Every time a seismic shift takes place in our economy, there are people who feel the vibrations long before the rest of us do, vibrations so strong they demand action—action that can seem rash, even stupid. Ferry owner Cornelius Vanderbilt jumped ship when he saw the railroads coming. Thomas Watson Jr., overwhelmed by his sense that computers would be everywhere even when they were nowhere, bet his father’s office-machine company on it: IBM. Jeffrey Preston Bezos had that same experience when he first peered into the maze of connected computers called the World Wide Web and realized that the future of retailing was glowing back at him.

My big dream back then was to buy an IBM Selectric. I still have that dream. I really ought to buy a word-processor. Half the cabbies at Rocky own computers. They tell me they can write failed novels ten times faster on a PC.

If you look at economics textbooks, you will learn that homo economicus can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM’s Big Blue, and exercise the willpower of Mahatma Gandhi. Really. But the folks that we know are not like that. Real people have trouble with long division if they don’t have a calculator, sometimes forget their spouse’s birthday, and have a hangover on New Year’s Day. They are not homo economicus; they are homo sapiens.

At that time in IBM you had to wear a white shirt, dark pants and a black tie with your badge stapled to your shoulder or something,” said Steve Bristow, an engineer. “At Atari the work people did counted more than how they looked.

The commercialization of molecular biology is the most stunning ethical event in the history of science, and it has happened with astonishing speed. For four hundred years since Galileo, science has always proceeded as a free and open inquiry into the workings of nature. Scientists have always ignored national boundaries, holding themselves above the transitory concerns of politics and even wars. Scientists have always rebelled against secrecy in research, and have even frowned on the idea of patenting their discoveries, seeing themselves as working to the benefit of all mankind. And for many generations, the discoveries of scientists did indeed have a peculiarly selfless quality... Suddenly it seemed as if everyone wanted to become rich. New companies were announced almost weekly, and scientists flocked to exploit genetic research... It is necessary to emphasize how significant this shift in attitude actually was. In the past, pure scientists took a snobbish view of business. They saw the pursuit of money as intellectually uninteresting, suited only to shopkeepers. And to do research for industry, even at the prestigious Bell or IBM labs, was only for those who couldn't get a university appointment. Thus the attitude of pure scientists was fundamentally critical toward the work of applied scientists, and to industry in general. Their long-standing antagonism kept university scientists free of contaminating industry ties, and whenever debate arose about technological matters, disinterested scientists were available to discuss the issues at the highest levels. But that is no longer true. There are very few molecular biologists and very few research institutions without commercial affiliations. The old days are gone. Genetic research continues, at a more furious pace than ever. But it is done in secret, and in haste, and for profit.

I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important.

Even thirty years later, reflecting back on the competition, Jobs cast it as a holy crusade: “IBM was essentially Microsoft at its worst. They were not a force for innovation; they were a force for evil. They were like ATT or Microsoft or Google is.” Unfortunately

Throughout his career, Jobs liked to see himself as an enlightened rebel pitted against evil empires, a Jedi warrior or Buddhist samurai fighting the forces of darkness. IBM was his perfect foil. He cleverly cast the upcoming battle not as a mere business competition,

I realized much later in life that the reason this decision between MIT and IBM was so agonizing was because it wasn't really about choosing a career; it was about deciding who I was, which part of myself I wanted to be, and that's the hardest decision any of us has to make.

Daniel Wolpert, of Cambridge University, is fond of pointing out that IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer is capable of beating a grand master at the game of chess, but no computer has yet been developed that can move a chess piece from one square to another as well as a 3-year-old child.

After IBM’s chess program Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, humans did not stop playing chess. Rather, thanks to AI trainers, human chess masters became better than ever, and at least for a while human-AI teams known as “centaurs” outperformed both humans and computers in chess.

No matter how many firewalls, encryption technologies, and antivirus scanners a company uses, if the human being behind the keyboard falls for a con, the company is toast. According to a 2014 in-depth study by IBM Security Services, up to 95 percent of security incidents involved human error.

certain group of people in the United States tried an experiment. They tried the experiment of making a fortune without working, of making a fortune through the stock exchange. They extended the experiment until it exploded and all went down to earth.  “Aspects of World Trade” Thomas J. Watson Sr. July 31, 1930

In my Confessions, I told how I started by making a list of the clients I most wanted – General Foods, Lever Brothers, Bristol Myers, Campbell Soup Company and Shell. It took time, but in due course I got them all, plus American Express, Sears Roebuck, IBM, Morgan Guaranty, Merrill Lynch and a few others, including

Using Hollerith’s tabulators, the 1890 census was completed in one year rather than eight. It was the first major use of electrical circuits to process information, and the company that Hollerith founded became in 1924, after a series of mergers and acquisitions, the International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM.

But Mandelbrot continued to feel oppressed by France’s purist mathematical establishment. “I saw no compatibility between a university position in France and my still-burning wild ambition,” he writes. So, spurred by the return to power in 1958 of Charles de Gaulle (for whom Mandelbrot seems to have had a special loathing), he accepted the offer of a summer job at IBM in Yorktown Heights, north of New York City. There he found his scientific home. As a large and somewhat bureaucratic corporation, IBM would hardly seem a suitable playground for a self-styled maverick. The late 1950s, though, were the beginning of a golden age of pure research at IBM. “We can easily afford a few great scientists doing their own thing,” the director of research told Mandelbrot on his arrival. Best of all, he could use IBM’s computers to make geometric pictures. Programming back then was a laborious business that involved transporting punch cards from one facility to another in the backs of station wagons.

You were never to say you weren't "fine, thank you — and yourself?" You were supposed to be Heidi. You were supposed to lug goat milk up the hills and not think twice. Heidi did not complain. Heidi did not do things like stand in front of the new IBM photocopier saying, "If this fucking Xerox machine breaks on me one more time, I'm going to slit my wrists.

Хармс говорил: — Телефон у меня простой — 32–08. Запоминается легко. Тридцать два зуба и восемь пальцев.

Particularly in the past fifty years the world has gradually been finding out something that architects have always known—that is—that everything is architecture. Charles Eames

He also telephoned the Real Time Computer Complex on the ground floor of the Operations Wing to ask that an additional big I.B.M. computer be brought onto the line.

All great masters in any line think positive thoughts, which they put into action with intensive desire tested and tempered by balanced judgement.   All

Меттер называл Орлова: «Толпа из одного человека».

Иосиф Бродский любил повторять: – Жизнь коротка и печальна. Ты заметил чем она вообще кончается?

Критика – часть литературы. Филология – косвенный продукт ее. Критик смотрит на литературу изнутри. Филолог – с ближайшей колокольни.

Сложное в литературе доступнее простого.

Можно, рассуждая о гидатопироморфизме, быть при этом круглым дураком. И наоборот, разглагольствуя о жареных грибах, быть весьма умным человеком.

Что-то подобное я ощущал в ресторанах на Брайтоне. Где больше шума, там и собирается народ. Может, в шуме легче быть никем?

My only explanation for our cheeky ambition is this: Being surrounded by pet-supply e-tailors worth more than IBM has a way of getting your sense of what’s possible all out of whack. The old millennium was dying; a better one was on its way. We were in our mid-twenties, and we had no idea what we were doing. But we knew we loved books. And so we set out to write them.

We needed a man to repair the machines, to keep them going and everything. And the army was always going to send this fellow they had, but he was always delayed. Now, we always were in a hurry. Everything we did, we tried to do as quickly as possible. In this particular case, we worked out all the numerical steps that the machines were supposed to do—multiply this, and then do this, and subtract that. Then we worked out the program, but we didn’t have any machine to test it on. So we set up this room with girls in it. Each one had a Marchant: one was the multiplier, another was the adder. This one cubed—all she did was cube a number on an index card and send it to the next girl. We went through our cycle this way until we got all the bugs out. It turned out that the speed at which we were able to do it was a hell of a lot faster than the other way, where every single person did all the steps. We got speed with this system that was the predicted speed for the IBM machine. The only difference is that the IBM machines didn’t get tired and could work three shifts. But the girls got tired after a while.

I believe the principles of structural revolution are the same,” Lou Gerstner pointed out in the middle of his positive transformation of IBM. “First, it takes personal commitment on the part of the CEO. This is not a job you can delegate. Second, it takes a willingness to confront and expel the people and the organizations that are throwing up roadblocks to the changes you consider critical.

You “burn” your way into the mind by narrowing the focus to a single word or concept. It’s the ultimate marketing sacrifice. Federal Express was able to put the word overnight into the minds of its prospects because it sacrificed its product line and focused on overnight package delivery only. In a way, the law of leadership—it’s better to be first than to be better—enables the first brand or company to own a word in the mind of the prospect. But the word the leader owns is so simple that it’s invisible. The leader owns the word that stands for the category. For example, IBM owns computer. This is another way of saying that the brand becomes a generic name for the category. “We need an IBM machine.” Is there any doubt that a computer is being requested? You can also test the validity of a leadership claim by a word association test. If the given words are computer, copier, chocolate bar, and cola, the four most associated words are IBM, Xerox, Hershey’s, and Coke. An astute leader will go one step further to solidify its position. Heinz owns the word ketchup. But Heinz went on to isolate the most important ketchup attribute. “Slowest ketchup in the West” is how the company

It was an IBM machine, archaic now but gaudy then. The university owned it, in effect, and it lay inside a room that none but the machine’s professional caretakers could enter during the day. But Alsing found out that a student could just walk into that room at night and play with the computer. Alsing didn’t drink much and he never took any other drugs. “I was a midnight programmer,” he confessed.

Behind every text footnote is a file folder with all the hardcopy documentation needed to document every sentence in this book at a moment’s notice. Moreover, I assembled a team of hair-splitting, nitpicking, adversarial researchers and archivists to review each and every sentence, collectively ensuring that each fact and fragment of a fact was backed up with the necessary black and white documents.

Historically, noted James Manyika, one of the authors of the McKinsey report, companies kept their eyes on competitors “who looked like them, were in their sector and in their geography.” Not anymore. Google started as a search engine and is now also becoming a car company and a home energy management system. Apple is a computer manufacturer that is now the biggest music seller and is also going into the car business, but in the meantime, with Apple Pay, it’s also becoming a bank. Amazon, a retailer, came out of nowhere to steal a march on both IBM and HP in cloud computing. Ten years ago neither company would have listed Amazon as a competitor. But Amazon needed more cloud computing power to run its own business and then decided that cloud computing was a business! And now Amazon is also a Hollywood studio.

These guys are a bunch of phonies. All they’ve got on their minds is impressing the new girls with the big words they’re so proud of and sticking their hands up their skirts. And when they’re seniors, they cut their hair short and go trooping to work for Mitsubishi or IBM or Fuji Bank. They marry pretty wives who’ve never read Marx and have kids they give fancy new names to that are enough to make you puke.

The 1970s were the decade of megabytes. In the summer of 1970, IBM introduced two new computer models with more memory than ever before: the Model 155, with 768,000 bytes of memory, and the larger Model 165, with a full megabyte, in a large cabinet. One of these room-filling mainframes could be purchased for $4,674,160. By 1982 Prime Computer was marketing a megabyte of memory on a single circuit board, for $36,000.

Deep Blue, IBM’s chess-playing computer, was a sole entity, and not a team of self-improving ASIs, but the feeling of going up against it is instructive. Two grandmasters said the same thing: “It’s like a wall coming at you.” IBM’s Jeopardy! champion, Watson, was a team of AIs—to answer every question it performed this AI force multiplier trick, conducting searches in parallel before assigning a probability to each answer.

At IBM, a corporation that embodied the ideal of the company man, the sales force gathered each morning to belt out the company anthem, “Ever Onward,” and to harmonize on the “Selling IBM” song, set to the tune of “Singin’ in the Rain.” “Selling IBM,” it began, “we’re selling IBM. What a glorious feeling, the world is our friend.” The ditty built to a stirring close: “We’re always in trim, we work with a vim. We’re selling, just selling, IBM.

Under Armour. "Ahora estamos en el punto donde está ocurriendo un cambio y los consumidores están demandando más de esta información. Esta asociación con IBM nos permitirá aportar valor al consumidor de manera inédita, ya que integramos la tecnología de aprendizaje de máquinas de IBM Watson con los robustos datos de la comunidad Connected Fitness de Under Armour, la comunidad digital más grande del mundo de más de 160 millones de miembros". [4]

Think different” isn’t just a slogan. It’s a credo, one that made Apple the most profitable company in human history. People accused Steve Jobs of creating a “reality distortion field,” but he understood that reality is already distorted. Apple would never win by trying to build a better mainframe computer. That would have been playing by IBM’s rules. Instead, Apple created a personal computer because that was what it wanted the future to look like.

On May 3, 1997, a chess match began between Deep Blue, a chess computer built by IBM, and Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion and possibly the best human player in history. Newsweek billed the match as “The Brain’s Last Stand.” On May 11, with the match tied at 2½–2½, Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in the final game. The media went berserk. The market capitalization of IBM increased by $18 billion overnight. AI had, by all accounts, achieved a massive breakthrough.

When it came time to renegotiate the price, Hoff made a critical recommendation to Noyce, one that helped create a huge market for general-purpose chips and assured that Intel would remain a driver of the digital age. It was a deal point that Bill Gates and Microsoft would emulate with IBM a decade later. In return for giving Busicom a good price, Noyce insisted that Intel retain the rights to the new chip and be allowed to license it to other companies for purposes other than making a calculator.

As a part of their effort to turn Watson into a practical tool, IBM researchers confronted one of the primary tenets of the big data revolution: the idea that prediction based on correlation is sufficient, and that a deep understanding of causation is usually both unachievable and unnecessary. A new feature they named “WatsonPaths” goes beyond simply providing an answer and lets researchers see the specific sources Watson consulted, the logic it used in its evaluation, and the inferences it made on

Mijn vader houdt van jazz en heeft een uitgebreide verzameling platen en banden waarvan hij vroeger als hij uit zijn werk kwam kon genieten. Hij kon met een rothumeur binnenkomen, maar als hij Dexter Gordon had opgezet en zichzelf een wodkacocktail had ingeschonken, ebde zijn stress snel weg en werd alles ‘te gek, jongen, gewoon te gek.’ Op het moment dat de naald op de plaat neerdaalde, maakt hij zijn das los en werd hij iemand anders dan degene die hij daarvoor was geweest, een conservatieve ingenieur met in zijn borstzakje een stel ibm-pennen met het opschrift denk na.

By 1996 Apple’s share of the market had fallen to 4% from a high of 16% in the late 1980s. Michael Spindler, the German-born chief of Apple’s European operations who had replaced Sculley as CEO in 1993, tried to sell the company to Sun, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. That failed, and he was ousted in February 1996 and replaced by Gil Amelio, a research engineer who was CEO of National Semiconductor. During his first year the company lost $1 billion, and the stock price, which had been $70 in 1991, fell to $14, even as the tech bubble was pushing other stocks into the stratosphere.

It wasn’t until I got to the law firm that things started hitting me. First, the people around me seemed pretty unhappy. You can go to any corporate law firm and see dozens of people whose satisfaction with their jobs is below average. The work was entirely uninspiring. We were for the most part grease on a wheel, helping shepherd transactions along; it was detail-intensive and often quite dull. Only years later did I realize what our economic purpose was: if a transaction was large enough, you had to pay a team of people to pore over documents into the wee hours to make sure nothing went wrong. I had zero attachment to my clients—not unusual, given that I was the last rung down on the ladder, and most of the time I only had a faint idea of who my clients were. Someone above me at the firm would give me a task, and I’d do it. I also kind of thought that being a corporate lawyer would help me with the ladies. Not so much, just so you know. It was true that I was getting paid a lot for a twenty-four-year-old with almost no experience. I made more than my father, who has a PhD in physics and had generated dozens of patents for IBM over the years. It seemed kind of ridiculous to me; what the heck had I done to deserve that kind of money? As you can tell, not a whole lot. That didn’t keep my colleagues from pitching a fit if the lawyers across the street were making one dollar more than we were. Most worrisome of all, my brain started to rewire itself after only the first few months. I was adapting. I started spotting issues in offering memoranda. My ten-thousand-yard unblinking document review stare got better and better. Holy cow, I thought—if I don’t leave soon, I’m going to become good at this and wind up doing it for a long time. My experience is a tiny data point in a much bigger problem.

Одна знакомая поехала на дачу к Вознесенским. Было это в середине зимы. Жена Вознесенского, Зоя, встретила ее очень радушно. Хозяин не появился. – Где же Андрей? – Сидин в чулане. В дубленке на голое тело. – С чего это вдруг? – Из чулана вид хороший на дорогу. А к нам должны приехать западные журналисты. Андрюша и решил: как появится машина – дубленку в сторону! Выбежит на задний двор и будет обсыпаться снегом. Журналисты увидят – русский медведь купается в снегу. Колоритно и впечатляюще! Андрюша их заметит, смутится. Затем, прикрывая срам, убежит. А статьи в западных газетах будут начинаться так: «Гениального русского поэта мы застали купающимся в снегу…

There were movies to go see at the Gem, which has long since been torn down; science fiction movies like Gog with Richard Egan and westerns with Audie Murphy (Teddy saw every movie Audie Murphy made at least three times; he believed Murphy was almost a god) and war movies with John Wayne. There were games and endless bolted meals, lawns to mow, places to run to, walls to pitch pennies against, people to clap you on the back. And now I sit here trying to look through an IBM keyboard and see that time, trying to recall the best and the worst of that green and brown summer, and I can almost feel the skinny, scabbed boy still buried in this advancing body and hear those sounds. But

IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream—my vision—was in place. The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done. The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there. In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one. From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference. Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one

I think we're all just doing our best to survive the inevitable pain and suffering that walks alongside us through life. Long ago, it was wild animals and deadly poxes and harsh terrain. I learned about it playing The Oregon Trail on an old IBM in my computer class in the fourth grade. The nature of the trail has changed, but we keep trekking along. We trek through the death of a sibling, a child, a parent, a partner, a spouse; the failed marriage, the crippling debt, the necessary abortion, the paralyzing infertility, the permanent disability, the job you can't seem to land; the assault, the robbery, the break-in, the accident, the flood, the fire; the sickness, the anxiety, the depression, the loneliness, the betrayal, the disappointment, and the heartbreak. There are these moments in life where you change instantly. In one moment, you're the way you were, and in the next, you're someone else. Like becoming a parent: you're adding, of course, instead of subtracting, as it is when someone dies, and the tone of the occasion is obviously different, but the principal is the same. Birth is an inciting incident, a point of no return, that changes one's circumstances forever. The second that beautiful baby onto whom you have projected all your hopes and dreams comes out of your body, you will never again do anything for yourself. It changes you suddenly and entirely. Birth and death are the same in that way.

The creative imitator looks at products or services from the viewpoint of the customer. IBM’s personal computer is practically indistinguishable from the Apple in its technical features, but IBM from the beginning offered the customer programs and software. Apple maintained traditional computer distribution through specialty stores. IBM—in a radical break with its own traditions—developed all kinds of distribution channels, specialty stores, major retailers like Sears, Roebuck, its own retail stores, and so on. It made it easy for the consumer to buy and it made it easy for the consumer to use the product. These, rather than hardware features, were the “innovations” that gave IBM the personal computer market.

Modern armies no longer line up in neat rows and charge each other from opposite sides of a battlefield. Strangely, however, they still train that way, for example, during marching drills. This practice is useful, it turns out, not to prep for actual battle conditions, but to build trust and solidarity among soldiers in a unit. Our species, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, is wired to form social bonds when we move in lockstep with each other.48 This can mean marching together, singing or chanting in unison, clapping hands to a beat, or even just wearing the same clothes. In the early decades of the 20th century, IBM used corporate songs to instill a sense of unity among their workers.49 Some companies in Japan still use these practices today.

Meanwhile, people are busy using fractals to explain any system that has defied other, more reductionist approaches. Since they were successfully applied by IBM's Benoit Mandlebrot to the problem of seemingly random, intermittent interference on the phone lines, fractals have been used to identify underlying patterns in weather systems, computer files, and bacteria cultures. Sometimes fractal enthusiasts go a bit too far, however, using these nonlinear equations to mine for patterns in systems where none exist. Applied to the stock market to consumer behavior, fractals may tell less about those systems than about the people searching for patterns within them. There is a dual nature to fractals: They orient us while at the same time challenging our sense of scale and appropriateness. They offer us access to the underlying patterns of complex systems while at the same time tempting us to look for patterns where none exist. This makes them a terrific icon for the sort of pattern recognition associated with present shock—a syndrome we'll call factalnoia. Like the robots on Mystery Science Theater 3000, we engage by relating one thing to another, even when the relationship is forced or imagined. The tsunami makes sense once it is connected to chemtrails, which make sense when they are connected to HAARP. It's not just conspiracy theorists drawing fractalnoid connections between things. In a world without time, any and all sense making must occur on the fly. Simultaneity often seems like all we have. That's why anyone contending with present shock will have a propensity to make connections between things happening in the same moment—as if there had to be an underlying logic.

Inspired by the punched railway tickets of the time, an inventor by the name of Herman Hollerith devised a system of punched manila cards to store information, and a machine, which he called the Hollerith Machine, to count and sort them. Hollerith was awarded a patent in 1889, and the government adopted the Hollerith Machine for the 1890 census. No one had ever seen anything like it. Wrote one awestruck observer, “The apparatus works as unerringly as the mills of the Gods, but beats them hollow as to speed.” Another, however, reasoned that the invention was of limited use: “As no one will ever use it but governments, the inventor will not likely get very rich.” This prediction, which Hollerith clipped and saved, would not prove entirely correct. Hollerith’s firm merged with several others in 1911 to become the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. A few years later it was renamed—to International Business Machines, or IBM.

As additional precautions, Kranz requested that a two-hundred-foot radio antenna (called a deep-space dish) in Australia be added to the global network tracking and communicating with the spacecraft, and that additional computers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland be what he called "cranked up" -- made ready for use. He also telephoned the Real Time Computer Complex on the ground floor of the Operations Wing to ask that an additional I.B.M. computer be brought onto the line.

The Air Force has always had more money than sales resistance, and they bought a one-year program (probably for something in the order of a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand dollars) and in June of 1961 Hawkins and Summers punched the “start” button and the machine started to shuffle IBM cards. And to print out structures that looked like road maps of a disaster area, since if the compounds depicted could even have been synthesized, they would have, infallibly, detonated instantly and violently. The machine’s prize contribution to the cause of science was the structure, to which it confidently attributed a specific impulse of 363.7 seconds, precisely to the tenth of a second, yet. The Air Force, appalled, cut the program off after a year, belatedly realizing that they could have got the same structure from any experienced propellant man (me, for instance) during half an hour’s conversation, and at a total cost of five dollars or so. (For drinks. I would have been afraid even to draw the structure without at least five Martinis under my belt.)

I am so sorry to hear of Asher's passing. I will miss his scientific insight and advice, but even more his humor and stubborn integrity. I remember when one of his colleagues complained about Asher's always rejecting his manuscript when they were sent to him to referee. Asher said in effect, 'You should thank me. I am only trying to protect your reputation.' He often pretended to consult me, a fellow atheist, on matters of religious protocol. {Charles H. Bennett's letter written to the family of Israeli physicist, Asher Peres}

COBOL er i dag uten tvil verdens mest brukte høynivå programmeringsspråk. Det har vært i kontinuerlig bruk siden den første kompilatoren så dagens lys i 1960. En rekke versjoner av COBOL er blitt standardisert og internasjonalisert, først i 1968, senere i 1974 og i 1985. Som standardisert språk har COBOL klart vist sin verdi. Men på tross av dette har ettervirkningene fra utviklingen vært forholdsvis beskjedne, bortsett fra det IBM-utviklede generelle programmeringsspråket PL/1 som ble lansert i begynnelsen av 1970-årene. Kanskje en av grunnene til en manglende bred videreføring av COBOLs gode prinsipper og strukturer er at få har sett det mulig å gå videre. En annen grunn er kanskje at mesteparten av COBOL-brukerne er nettopp brukere og ikke teknologer. Den store masse av brukerne er enten ikke i stand til eller interessert i å utvikle et nytt programmeringsspråk, så lenge de har ett som virker bra, og som dessuten har vist seg å være utrolig pålitelig. COBOL har derfor vært uten virkelig konkurranse i over førti år. Selv i dag skrives det flere applikasjonsprogrammer i COBOL enn i hvilket som helst annet høynivå programmeringsspråk, FORTRAN inklusivt.

In the early thirties IBM built a high-speed calculating machine to do calculations for the astronomers at New York’s Columbia University. A few years later it built a machine that was already designed as a computer—again, to do astronomical calculations, this time at Harvard. And by the end of World War II, IBM had built a real computer—the first one, by the way, that had the features of the true computer: a “memory” and the capacity to be “programmed.” And yet there are good reasons why the history books pay scant attention to IBM as a computer innovator. For as soon as it had finished its advanced 1945 computer—the first computer to be shown to a lay public in its showroom in midtown New York, where it drew immense crowds—IBM abandoned its own design and switched to the design of its rival, the ENIAC developed at the University of Pennsylvania. The ENIAC was far better suited to business applications such as payroll, only its designers did not see this. IBM structured the ENIAC so that it could be manufactured and serviced and could do mundane “numbers crunching.” When IBM’s version of the ENIAC came out in 1953, it at once set the standard for commercial, multipurpose, mainframe computers. This is the strategy of “creative imitation.

Then, in the end, the leader makes the call. It’s conflict and debate leading to an executive decision. No major decision we’ve studied was ever taken at a point of unanimous agreement. There was always some disagreement in the air. Our research showed that before a major decision, you would see significant debate. But after the decision, people would unify behind that decision to make it successful. Again, and I can’t stress this too much, it all begins with having the right people—those who can debate in search of the best answers but who can then set aside their disagreements and work together for the success of the enterprise.

One of those was Gary Bradski, an expert in machine vision at Intel Labs in Santa Clara. The company was the world’s largest chipmaker and had developed a manufacturing strategy called “copy exact,” a way of developing next-generation manufacturing techniques to make ever-smaller chips. Intel would develop a new technology at a prototype facility and then export that process to wherever it planned to produce the denser chips in volume. It was a system that required discipline, and Bradski was a bit of a “Wild Duck”—a term that IBM originally used to describe employees who refused to fly in formation—compared to typical engineers in Intel’s regimented semiconductor manufacturing culture. A refugee from the high-flying finance world of “quants” on the East Coast, Bradski arrived at Intel in 1996 and was forced to spend a year doing boring grunt work, like developing an image-processing software library for factory automation applications. After paying his dues, he was moved to the chipmaker’s research laboratory and started researching interesting projects. Bradski had grown up in Palo Alto before leaving to study physics and artificial intelligence at Berkeley and Boston University. He returned because he had been bitten by the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial bug.

a harbinger of a third wave of computing, one that blurred the line between augmented human intelligence and artificial intelligence. “The first generation of computers were machines that counted and tabulated,” Rometty says, harking back to IBM’s roots in Herman Hollerith’s punch-card tabulators used for the 1890 census. “The second generation involved programmable machines that used the von Neumann architecture. You had to tell them what to do.” Beginning with Ada Lovelace, people wrote algorithms that instructed these computers, step by step, how to perform tasks. “Because of the proliferation of data,” Rometty adds, “there is no choice but to have a third generation, which are systems that are not programmed, they learn.”27 But even as this occurs, the process could remain one of partnership and symbiosis with humans rather than one designed to relegate humans to the dustbin of history. Larry Norton, a breast cancer specialist at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, was part of the team that worked with Watson. “Computer science is going to evolve rapidly, and medicine will evolve with it,” he said. “This is coevolution. We’ll help each other.”28 This belief that machines and humans will get smarter together is a process that Doug Engelbart called “bootstrapping” and “coevolution.”29 It raises an interesting prospect: perhaps no matter how fast computers progress, artificial intelligence may never outstrip the intelligence of the human-machine partnership. Let us assume, for example, that a machine someday exhibits all of the mental capabilities of a human: giving the outward appearance of recognizing patterns, perceiving emotions, appreciating beauty, creating art, having desires, forming moral values, and pursuing goals. Such a machine might be able to pass a Turing Test. It might even pass what we could call the Ada Test, which is that it could appear to “originate” its own thoughts that go beyond what we humans program it to do. There would, however, be still another hurdle before we could say that artificial intelligence has triumphed over augmented intelligence. We can call it the Licklider Test. It would go beyond asking whether a machine could replicate all the components of human intelligence to ask whether the machine accomplishes these tasks better when whirring away completely on its own or when working in conjunction with humans. In other words, is it possible that humans and machines working in partnership will be indefinitely more powerful than an artificial intelligence machine working alone?

En realidad, ya hemos cruzado esta línea en lo que a la medicina se refiere. En el hospital ya no somos individuos. ¿Quién cree el lector que tomará las decisiones más trascendentales sobre su cuerpo y su salud a lo largo de su vida? Es muy probable que muchas de tales decisiones las tomen algoritmos informáticos como el Watson de IBM. Y esto no es necesariamente una mala noticia. Los diabéticos ya llevan sensores que comprueban automáticamente su nivel de azúcar varias veces al día, y les alertan siempre que este cruza un umbral peligroso. En 2014, investigadores de la Universidad de Yale anunciaron la primera prueba exitosa con un «páncreas artificial» controlado por un iPhone. Cincuenta y dos diabéticos participaron en el experimento. Cada paciente tenía un sensor diminuto y una bomba minúscula implantados en el estómago. La bomba estaba conectada a pequeños tubos de insulina y glucagón, dos hormonas que regulan conjuntamente los niveles de azúcar en sangre. El sensor medía constantemente el nivel de azúcar y transmitía los datos a un iPhone. Este contenía una aplicación que analizaba la información y, siempre que era necesario, daba órdenes a la bomba, que inyectaba cantidades determinadas de insulina o de glucagón…, todo ello sin necesidad de intervención humana.[22]

By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements. Sears, for example, failed to move from department stores to discount retailing; IBM couldn’t shift from mainframe to minicomputers. The companies that solved the innovator’s dilemma, Christensen wrote, succeeded when they “set up autonomous organizations charged with building new and independent businesses around the disruptive technology.”9 Drawing lessons directly from the book, Bezos unshackled Kessel from Amazon’s traditional media organization. “Your job is to kill your own business,” he told him. “I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.” Bezos underscored the urgency of the effort. He believed that if Amazon didn’t lead the world into the age of digital reading, then Apple or Google would. When Kessel asked Bezos what his deadline was on developing the company’s first piece of hardware, an electronic reading

The market's second wild trait-almost-cycles-is prefigured in the story of Joseph. Pharaoh dreamed that seven fat cattle were feeding in the meadows, when seven lean kine rose out of the Nile and ate them. Likewise, seven scraggly ears of corn consumed seven plump ears. Joseph, a Hebrew slave, called the dreams prophetic: Seven years of famine would follow seven years of prosperity. He advised Pharaoh to stockpile grain for bad times to come. And when all passed as prophesied, "Joseph opened all the storehouses, and sold unto the Egyptians...And all countries came into Egypt to Joseph to buy corn; because that the famine was so sore in all lands." Given the profits he and Pharaoh must have made, one might call Joseph the first international arbitrageur. That pattern, familiar from Hurst's work on the Nile, also appears in markets. A big 3 percent change in IBM's stock one day might precede a 2 percent jump another day, then a 1.5 percent change, then a 3.5 percent move-as if the first big jumps were continuing to echo down the succeeding days' trading. Of course, this is not a regular or predictable pattern. But the appearance of one is strong. Behind it is the influence of long-range dependence in an otherwise random process-or, put another way, a long-term memory through which the past continues to influence the random fluctuations of the present.

What’s the best thing you’ve done in your work and career? In business decision-making, certainly one of your highlights was licensing your computer operating system to IBM for almost no money, provided you could retain the right to license the system to other computer manufacturers as well. IBM was happy to agree because, after all, nobody would possibly want to compete with the most powerful company in the world, right? With that one decision, your system and your company became dominant throughout the world, and you, Bill Gates, were on your way to a net worth of more than $60 billion. Or maybe you’d like to look at your greatest career achievement from a different angle. Instead of focusing on the decision that helped you make so much money, maybe you’d like to look at the decision to give so much of it away. After all, no other person in history has become a philanthropist on the scale of Bill Gates. Nations in Africa and Asia are receiving billions of dollars in medical and educational support. This may not be as well publicized as your big house on Lake Washington with its digitalized works of art, but it’s certainly something to be proud of. Determining your greatest career achievement is a personal decision. It can be something obvious or something subtle. But it should make you proud of yourself when you think of it. So take a moment, then make your choice.

In a 1997 showdown billed as the final battle for supremacy between natural and artificial intelligence, IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue evaluated two hundred million positions per second. That is a tiny fraction of possible chess positions—the number of possible game sequences is more than atoms in the observable universe—but plenty enough to beat the best human. According to Kasparov, “Today the free chess app on your mobile phone is stronger than me.” He is not being rhetorical. “Anything we can do, and we know how to do it, machines will do it better,” he said at a recent lecture. “If we can codify it, and pass it to computers, they will do it better.” Still, losing to Deep Blue gave him an idea. In playing computers, he recognized what artificial intelligence scholars call Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses. There is a saying that “chess is 99 percent tactics.” Tactics are short combinations of moves that players use to get an immediate advantage on the board. When players study all those patterns, they are mastering tactics. Bigger-picture planning in chess—how to manage the little battles to win the war—is called strategy. As Susan Polgar has written, “you can get a lot further by being very good in tactics”—that is, knowing a lot of patterns—“and have only a basic understanding of strategy.

IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream—my vision—was in place. The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done. The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there. In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one. From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference. Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one Now,

I once heard a story about Tom Watson, the founder of IBM. Asked to what he attributed the phenomenal success of IBM, he is said to have answered: IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream—my vision—was in place. The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done. The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there. In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one. From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference. Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one Now,

Да речем, че съм обикновен човек, въпреки че това не е съвсем точно: няма обикновени хора. Но историята не ми е отредила някаква особена роля, нито пък, успокоявам се, е имало условия за такова нещо. Никога не съм драпал за ня- какво изключително място в живота. Това може би е после- дица от вродената ми срамежливост и стеснителност, а мо- же би и работа на домашното ми възпитание (израсъл съм в скромно чиновническо семейство) , при това никога не съм командвал други, нито пък това ме е привличало. Но затова пък други са ме командвали! По време на двайсетгодишната си служба смених над сто шефове, секретари, началници, помощници и директори. Те бяха какви ли не. Търпеливо чаках да се уморят малките тирани от властването и да из- чезнат от моя живот. Само каква наивност! Понякога и до- чаквах това (умираха или биваха свалени от длъжност), но, уви, наследяваха ги тозчас някакви млади, подобни на тях, бодри и отпочинали – жадни за власт и могъщество. Колко- то и да е незначително – господството няма край! Сякаш ми биваше по-добре с онези, предишните. Първо, биваха зна- чително по-възрастни от мене, освен това, много от тях с времето бяха затлъстели, натежали, уморили се от властва- не, станали някак си тромави и дори добродушни, защото се бяха уверили, че не желая да им отнемам поста. Трябваше, значи, да чакам и техните наследници да се наядат, да под- редят апартаменти и къщи, да изженят децата и най-накрая да мирясат... Но аз имам само един живот! А той далеч не е толкова дълъг, че да изтрае, докато се изредят всички онези, които са жадни за власт. Би било наивно да се вярва, че вла- стта – тази прастара подправка на историята – ще изчезне в някоя канцелария само затова, че са измислени електричес- ките пишещи машини, та кореспонденцията на шефовете вече не се преписва с подострено гъше перо от Гоголевия колежки секретар от четиринайсети чиновнически клас, а това вече извършва електронна машина IBM.

The collapse, for example, of IBM’s legendary 80-year-old hardware business in the 1990s sounds like a classic P-type story. New technology (personal computers) displaces old (mainframes) and wipes out incumbent (IBM). But it wasn’t. IBM, unlike all its mainframe competitors, mastered the new technology. Within three years of launching its first PC, in 1981, IBM achieved $5 billion in sales and the #1 position, with everyone else either far behind or out of the business entirely (Apple, Tandy, Commodore, DEC, Honeywell, Sperry, etc.). For decades, IBM dominated computers like Pan Am dominated international travel. Its $13 billion in sales in 1981 was more than its next seven competitors combined (the computer industry was referred to as “IBM and the Seven Dwarfs”). IBM jumped on the new PC like Trippe jumped on the new jet engines. IBM owned the computer world, so it outsourced two of the PC components, software and microprocessors, to two tiny companies: Microsoft and Intel. Microsoft had all of 32 employees. Intel desperately needed a cash infusion to survive. IBM soon discovered, however, that individual buyers care more about exchanging files with friends than the brand of their box. And to exchange files easily, what matters is the software and the microprocessor inside that box, not the logo of the company that assembled the box. IBM missed an S-type shift—a change in what customers care about. PC clones using Intel chips and Microsoft software drained IBM’s market share. In 1993, IBM lost $8.1 billion, its largest-ever loss. That year it let go over 100,000 employees, the largest layoff in corporate history. Ten years later, IBM sold what was left of its PC business to Lenovo. Today, the combined market value of Microsoft and Intel, the two tiny vendors IBM hired, is close to $1.5 trillion, more than ten times the value of IBM. IBM correctly anticipated a P-type loonshot and won the battle. But it missed a critical S-type loonshot, a software standard, and lost the war.

Quanta. On Yom Kippur Eve, the quanta went to ask Einstein for his forgiveness. “I'm not home,” Einstein yelled at them from behind his locked door. On their way back, people swore loudly at them through the windows, and someone even threw a can. The quanta pretended not to care, but deep in their hearts they were really hurt. Nobody understands the quanta, everybody hates them. “You parasites,” people would shout at them as they walked down the road. “Go serve in the army.” “We wanted to, actually,” the quanta would try to explain, “but the army wouldn't take us because we're so tiny.” Not that anyone listened. Nobody listens to the quanta when they try to defend themselves, but when they say something that can be interpreted negatively, well, then everyone's all ears. The quanta can make the most innocent statement, like “Look, there's a cat!” and right away they're saying on the news how the quanta were stirring up trouble and they rush off to interview Schrödinger. All in all, the media hated the quanta worse than anybody, because once the quanta had spoken at an IBM press conference about how the very act of viewing had an effect on an event, and all the journalists thought the quanta were lobbying to keep them from covering the Intifada. The quanta could insist as much as they wanted that this wasn't at all what they meant and that they had no political agenda whatsoever, but nobody would believe them anyway. Everyone knew they were friends of the government's Chief Scientist. Loads of people think the quanta are indifferent, that they have no feelings, but it simply isn't true. On Friday, after the program about the bombing of Hiroshima, they were interviewed in the studio in Jerusalem. They could barely talk. They just sat there facing the open mike and sniffling, and all the viewers at home, who didn't know the quanta very well, thought they were avoiding the question and didn't realize the quanta were crying What's sad is that even if the quanta were to write dozens of letters to the editors of all the scientific journals in the world and prove beyond a doubt that people had taken advantage of their naiveté, and that they'd never ever imagined it would end that way, it wouldn't do them any good, because nobody understands the quanta. The physicists least of all.

Наверное, большинство людей тешит себя надеждой, что если ты уже так безжалостно сокрушен, то само страдание во всей своей полноте окружает тебя безопасным коконом. Счастье легко спугнуть, как капризную птицу. Она улетит, как только один из нас выкрикнет: "Взгляни на этого прекрасного лебедя!" Счастье не скучно. Просто это не очень интересная история. ...я отличаюсь от себя в юности только одним: теперь я считаю тех, кому нечего или почти нечего рассказать о себе, страшно счастливыми. Итак, я винила себя, и он винил меня. Я чувствовала себя жертвой группового нападения. Оказалось, что я никогда не была на бейсбольном матче. Или в Йеллоустоуне. Или в Гранд-Каньоне. Я смеялась над ними. А еще я никогда не ела в «Макдоналдсе» горячий яблочный пирожок. (Я признаю: он мне понравился.) Ты сказал, что когда-нибудь не будет никаких «Макдоналдсов», а огромное их количество вовсе не означает, что горячие яблочные пирожки не изумительно вкусны, и разве это не привилегия - жить в то время, когда их можно купить всего за 99 центов. Это была одна из твоих любимейших тем: изобилие, копирование, популярность совсем не обязательно ведут к обесцениванию, и само время делает все вещи редкими. Ты любил смаковать настоящее время и больше всех моих знакомых сознавал его мимолетность. Но если я всю планету считала своим личным задним двором, то сама эта наглость ставила на мне клеймо безнадежной американки, как и странное заблуждение, что я могла бы сделать из себя тропический, интернациональный гибрид ужасающе специфического происхождения: Расин, Висконсин. Даже небрежность, с коей я покидала родную страну, роднила меня с нашим любопытным, беспокойным, агрессивным народом, который весь (кроме тебя) самодовольно полагает, что Америка — величина постоянная. Европейцы лучше информированы. Они сознают прожорливость истории и часто устремляются назад возделать собственный бренный сад, убедиться, что Дания, например, никуда не делась. Однако для тех из нас, для кого «вторжение» ассоциируется исключительно с космосом, наша страна — неприступная скала, которая невредимой будет вечно ждать нашего возвращения. Я действительно много раз объясняла иностранцам, что мои странствия облегчаются пониманием того, что «Соединенные Штаты во мне не нуждаются». Моя мать видит хаос у своего порога, в то время как остальные обитают в искусственной среде, необоснованно считая ее доброжелательной, — коллективное заблуждение. Во мне вспыхнуло дикое сексуальное желание, и — могу заверить тебя — это была необходимость другого порядка. Я хотела обеспечить запасной вариант для тебя и для нас, словно сунуть копирку в мою электрическую пишущую машинку IBM. Я хотела убедиться, что, если с любым из нас что-то случится, останутся не только носки. Только в ту ночь я хотела ребенка, распихнутого по всем уголкам, как деньги в тайниках, как спрятанные от слабовольных алкоголиков бутылки водки. — Я не поставила диафрагму, — прошептала я, когда мы угомонились. Ты зашевелился. — Это опасно? — Это очень опасно, — сказала я. Конечно. Всего через девять месяцев мог явиться любой незнакомец. С тем же успехом мы могли оставить дверь незапертой. Как бы мы ни относились к обоим полам, мало кто испугается стайки хихикающих школьниц. Однако любая женщина, проходящая мимо бурлящих тестостероном юнцов, ускорит шаг, постарается не смотреть им в глаза, что может быть принято за вызов или приглашение, и мысленно вздохнет с облегчением, добравшись до следующего дома. Если нет, то она зоологическая дура. Мальчик — опасный зверь. Харви было все равно. Он один из тех адвокатов, которые воспринимают закон как игру, и игру не нравственную. Мне говорили, что именно такой и нужен. Харви обожает заявлять, что правота никогда никому не помогала выиграть дело, и у меня даже создалось смутное ощущение, что иметь закон на своей стороне невыгодно.

Follow-up Call (Script) Seller: “Hello Mr. Prospect, my name is Tom Freese, and I’m the regional manager for KnowledgeWare in Kansas City. I wanted to contact you about the CASE application development seminar we are hosting at IBM’s Regional Headquarters on August 26. Do you remember receiving the invitation we sent you? (Pause for a response) “Frankly, we are expecting a record turnout—over one hundred people, including development managers from Sprint, Hallmark Cards, Pepsi Co., Yellow Freight, Kansas Power & Light, the Federal Reserve Bank, Northwest Mutual Life, American Family Life, St. Luke’s Hospital, Anheuser-Busch, MasterCard, American Express, Worldspan, and United Airlines, just to name a few. “I wanted to follow up because we haven’t yet received an RSVP from your company, and I wanted to make sure you didn’t get left out.” Granted, this was a highly positioned approach, but it was also 100 percent accurate. I wanted prospects to know that IBM was endorsing this event. I also wanted to let them know that I expected “everyone else” to participate. I accomplished this by rattling off an impressive list of marquee company names that we were “expected” to attend. Most importantly, I wanted to make sure that they didn’t get left out.

It began to dawn on me then that the purpose of life wasn’t to love your job’, [Cook] told a group of Oxford students [in 2007]. ‘It was to serve humanity in some broad way, and the outcome of doing that would mean that you would love your job. I began to realize I wasn’t in a place to do that [at IBM].

Most Mondays, their visit to Ive would be followed by one to Avie and the team working on Apple’s new operating system, which would eventually be called OS X. The radical new operating system would be the flywheel of all the extraordinary developments that would follow over the next decade, from Apple’s suite of iLife applications, to iOS—the slimmed-down operating system that would give life to the iPhone and iPad—to the entirely new software industry that emerged to produce the millions of apps written for those devices. While Steve’s gadgets and computers drew the most attention, the software that made them go was every bit as important. Steve always said that Apple’s primary competitive advantage was that it created the whole widget: the finely tuned symbiosis between the hardware and the software together defined a superior user experience. In the PC world, hardware and software technologies came from different companies that didn’t always even get along, including IBM and the PC-clone manufacturers, Microsoft, and Intel.

Thomas J. Watson, the former chairman of IBM, said, “Nothing so conclusively proves a man’s ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself.

Others find excuses for not writing at the same time every day, balk at re-revising incessantly, or excuse themselves because their lives are beset by difficulties. I am deaf to that excuse because I worked with the most disadvantaged writer in history, Christy Brown, who had the use of his brain, the little toe on his left foot, and little else. When he was a seemingly helpless baby lying on the kitchen floor of a cottage in Ireland, his remarkable mother saw him reach out with his left foot and with his one good toe manage to pick up a crayon that one of his siblings had dropped. That was the beginning of a writer. Eventually someone at IBM made a special typewriter for Christy that enabled him to punch in a letter at a time with his one working toe. I published five of Christy Brown’s books, one of which made the national bestseller lists.

IBM set the world record for the smallest stop motion film by using single atoms.

Only eight companies in the world built the type of hardware she would need: Atom Computing, Xanadu, IBM, ColdQuanta, Zapata Computing, Azure Quantum, and Strangeworks.

A good chief executive is essentially a hard-to-automate decision engine, not unlike IBM’s Jeopardy!-playing Watson system. They have built up a hard-won repository of experience and have honed and proved an instinct for their market. They’re then presented inputs throughout the day—in the form of e-mails, meetings, site visits, and the like—that they must process and act on. To ask a CEO to spend four hours thinking deeply about a single problem is a waste of what makes him or her valuable. It’s better to hire three smart subordinates to think deeply about the problem and then bring their solutions to the executive for a final decision.

Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business.

But Burlington’s big post–World War II turning point came with the arrival in the late 1950s of what eventually turned out to be one of IBM’s major semiconductor works, in the suburb of Essex Junction, just east of Burlington. At its peak, the IBM factory employed some eight thousand engineers and technical workers. Its staff fell to about three thousand (and IBM has sold the works to another company, a Silicon Valley spin-off called GlobalFoundries). But its influence on Burlington remains profound.

IBM acquired a great deal of modern manufacturing and sales capacity—for the wrong products.

how did IBM get into this mess in the first place? It is the central question to ask because its senior executives understood the economic dynamics underpinning IBM’s mainframe and PC businesses. Despite this, the majority demonstrated a reluctance to reduce the power and cultural influence of their portions of the firm as technological changes suggested new directions, new opportunities not seized on as quickly as they might have been,

That it failed to fix IBM’s problems or help Akers suggests that collectively the board proved unwilling, complicit, or simply incompetent to carry out its fiduciary and ethical responsibilities until forced to by circumstances.

Why did eBay not become Amazon? Why did IBM not become Microsoft? Why didn't taxi companies invent Uber? Why didn't Hilton or Marriott invent Airbnb? Why didn't Oracle invent Snowflake? Why didn't BMC invent ServiceNow? Why didn't tape automation companies invent Data Domain? Why didn't Ford invent Tesla? The answer in all those examples, and many more, is incrementalism.

100% Confidence Appreciation Admiration Love Dad

Paperwork management was provisional and makeshift. Rochefort and his principal analysts knew they ought to devise a proper filing system, with cross-indexing of archived messages, but they never found the time for that. Somehow, through the blizzard of decrypts and IBM cards, order prevailed over chaos. “This is one reason why these people are mostly crazy,” Rochefort later recalled. “We’d have no problem at all.” You’d mention something and you’d say, “Now wait a minute. Back here when they were around Halmahera on their way down to a landing at Port Something-or-other, there was a message like this. Let’s have it.” And they’d look in this pile of junk and they were able to locate it. . . . And then of course, you’d get a new one here and this leads to another thing over here and this leads to another thing and this is how you fill the whole works up. One letter leads to another and that leads to a third one and so on. Then that’s when your memory comes in very handy. Holmes added that a cryptanalyst “needs only time, patience, an infinite capacity for work, a mind that can focus on one problem to the exclusion of everything else, a photographic memory, the inability to drop an unsolved problem, and a large volume of traffic.

Kelly could perceive the obvious differences between IBM and Bell Labs. IBM was a computer company, first and foremost, and not a communications company. “We were moving faster than Bell Labs would,” Gunther-Mohr says, noting that Bell Labs had a thirty-year schedule for applying its inventions to the phone network.

The Apple Ad to IBM when the IBM computer launched. Welcome to the most exciting and important marketplace since the computer revolution began 35 years ago. Read the opening sentence of Apple's Ad. Putting real computer power in the hands of the individual is already improving the way people work, think, learn, communicate, and spend their leisure hours. Ove the course of the next decade the growth of the personal computer will continue in algorithmic leaps. We look forward to responsible competition in the massive effort to distribute this American technology to the world. And we appreciate the magnitude of your commitment, because what we are doing is increasing social capital by enhancing individual productivity. Apple signed the letter to their new rival with the words, Welcome to the task. Apple was trying to advance a just cause and IBM was going to help them. IBM accepted the challenge.

Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure, or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember, that’s where you will find success.”   Thomas Watson, former chairman and CEO of IBM

Lancaster hired Anand Sharma, CEO of TBM Consulting Group and a man named by Fortune magazine as one of America’s Heroes of Manufacturing, to assist the company in a dramatic and swift turnaround. They shut down the assembly line one weekend, turned off the IBM material planning system the company had invested millions of dollars in, and said, “We’re never going back to doing things the way we did, and within five days we have to have a new way of doing things.” With Sharma’s guidance the forty team members selected for the reinvention mapped the firm’s current processes, collectively designed new ones, and set a series of objectives.

IBM estimated in 2013 that 90 percent of the world’s information was less than two years old. 11 Most of this information was created and consumed online. Contrary to how people lived throughout most of human history, today siloed information has become the exception rather than the norm.

...Sonra da, dördüncü yıla geldiklerinde, Mitsubishi'de IBM'de veya Fuji Bankası'nda işe alınmak için saçlarını kestiriyorlardı, sonra da Marx'ı hiç okumamış güzel bir genç kadınla evleniyorlar ve çocuklarına olmadık, gülünç adlar veriyorlardı. ...Öylesine gülünç ki, insanın ağlayası geliyor.

In the next three years, the value of data will increase, making it even more valuable than it is today. The more efficiently you store your data, the more benefits your business will see.

Today the accepted Silicon Valley wisdom is that as cars turn into cell phones on wheels, software will inevitably trump hardware, just as Microsoft trumped IBM. As lithium batteries replace combustion engines, automobile hardware will become commodified, and the new growth market will be in information services.

At the time,” he said, “I was young, and I looked younger. IBM had people around the table who were initially quite skeptical of me.” He explained that the first step in a sales meeting is having to blast through skepticism, and the best way to do that is by overwhelming people with your expertise. Gates would talk fast and dive immediately into the details—character sets, computer chips, programming languages, software platforms—to the point that it became undeniably clear he wasn’t just some kid.

Bolivar prophesied shrewdly that the United States seemed fated by Providence to plague America with woes in the name of liberty. General Motors or IBM will not step graciously into our shoes and raise the old banners of unity and emancipation which fell in battle; nor can heroes betrayed yesterday be redeemed by the traitors of today. It is a big load of rottenness that has to be sent to the bottom of the sea on the march to Latin America's reconstruction. The task lies in the hands of the dispossessed, the humiliated, the accursed. The Latin American cause is above all a social cause: the rebirth of Latin America must start with the overthrow of its masters, country by country. We are entering times of rebellion and change. There are those who believe that destiny rests on the knees of the gods; but the truth is that it confronts the conscience of man with a burning challenge.

received a message on LinkedIn from an IBM executive who wrote, “Pat, I’ve been at IBM for a while and I have been following your content for a few years. I make good money, but I really want to be an entrepreneur. However, I have a wife and three kids and I’m kind of worried about them. What should I do?” We emailed back and forth for a while, and I asked him questions about who he wanted to be. He began to see that intrapreneurship looked like the ideal choice for him. This is when you’re part of a company and create a new business unit, lead a new initiative, or work out incentives that reward you for driving growth and innovation. In some cases, it might just mean being so indispensable that a company has to pay you equity to retain you.

Indeed, when Mandelbrot sifted the cotton-price data through IBM’s computers, he found the astonishing results he was seeking. The numbers that produced aberrations from the point of view of normal distribution produced symmetry from the point of view of scaling. Each particular price change was random and unpredictable. But the sequence of changes was independent of scale: curves for daily price changes and monthly price changes matched perfectly. Incredibly, analyzed Mandelbrot’s way, the degree of variation had remained constant over a tumultuous sixty-year period that saw two World Wars and a depression.

programmer can fully prepare for in advance. It’s impossible for them to upload every single variable. As you observe the market, in real time, you will see those unpredictable moments and you will profit in them. You must be very strategic with every trade you enter. Never forget that in the equally strategic world of chess, Garry Kasparov did win some of his rounds against IBM’s Deep Blue. More recently, even IBM’s Watson got answer after answer wrong when playing on Jeopardy! You must also remember that any one organization’s powerful “black box” is trading against all of the other

IBM stands for three things: the dignity of the individual, excellence, and service.

The fashionable term now is “Big Data.” IBM estimates that we are generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, more than 90 percent of which was created in the last two years.36 This exponential growth in information is sometimes seen as a cure-all, as computers were in the 1970s. Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, wrote in 2008 that the sheer volume of data would obviate the need for theory, and even the scientific method.37 This is an emphatically pro-science and pro-technology book, and I think of it as a very optimistic one. But it argues that these views are badly mistaken. The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning. Like Caesar, we may construe them in self-serving ways that are detached from their objective reality. Data-driven predictions can succeed—and they can fail. It is when we deny our role in the process that the odds of failure rise. Before we demand more of our data, we need to demand more of ourselves.

Data mining systems, such as IBM SPSS Modeler, are industrial strength systems that provide capabilities to apply a wide range of analytical models on large data sets. Open source systems, such as Weka, are popular platforms designed to help mine large amounts of data to discover patterns.

The best entrepreneurs create environments of stressful urgency. Entrepreneurs know that start-ups rarely get anything done in a relaxed, take-your-time environment. For example, Steve Jobs, the cofounder of Apple, was notorious for pushing his team beyond its limits by setting seemingly unrealistic timelines. As a result, his company created products quicker than they had ever imagined was possible and thus gained a huge competitive advantage over rival companies like IBM.

In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one.

In the seminal high-tech book The Mythical Man-Month, IBM veteran and computer science professor Frederick Brooks argued that adding manpower to complex software projects actually delayed progress. One reason was that the time and money spent on communication increased in proportion to the number of people on a project.

How did you wind up in Wayward Pines?” “I was a rep for IBM. Came here on a sales call trying to outfit the local school’s computer lab with our Tandy 1000s.

Jeff also notes that the talent he hired was probably inappropriate for the transformation. “I hired big tech pedigree leaders—from Cisco, SAP, IBM, and Oracle—but not true entrepreneurs. They thought about scale, not experimentation. I would have done that differently.

The dynamism of new monopolies itself explains why old monopolies don’t strangle innovation. With Apple’s iOS at the forefront, the rise of mobile computing has dramatically reduced Microsoft’s decades-long operating system dominance. Before that, IBM’s hardware monopoly of the ’60s and ’70s was overtaken by Microsoft’s software monopoly. AT&T had a monopoly on telephone service for most of the 20th century, but now anyone can get a cheap cell phone plan from any number of providers.

By now you might be wondering what’s the point of investing in a stodgy old company such as IBM, GM, or U.S. Steel? There are several reasons you might do this. First, big companies are less risky, in that they generally are in no danger of going out of business. Second, they are likely to pay a dividend. Third, they have valuable assets that might be sold off at a profit.

The June 17, 1971 edition of New Scientist and Science Journal likewise referenced the Tower of Babel regarding computer language development. Then, in an IBM press release on March 20, 2008, the headline read, “IBM, Forterra Using Unified Communications in Virtual Worlds to Solve ‘Tower of Babel’ for Intelligence Agencies,” announcing a virtual reality sharing system. The article outlines a futuristic unified communications solution code named “Babel Bridge” that could allow U.S. intelligence agencies to instantly communicate within a virtual world.

Mandelbrot appended this statement to his entry in Who’s Who: “Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads-by–choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.” This nomad-by–choice, who also called himself a pioneer-by–necessity, withdrew from academe when he withdrew from France, accepting the shelter of IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

These founders didn’t necessarily start billion-dollar companies because they worked at Google, Oracle, or IBM. Instead, perhaps those brand-name companies attracted the most ambitious and entrepreneurially minded people in the first place.

The proactive approach to a mistake is to acknowledge it instantly, correct and learn from it. This literally turns a failure into a success. “Success,” said IBM founder T. J. Watson, “is on the far side of failure.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.

Motorola Mobility and IBM’s personal computer division have been acquired by Lenovo;66 Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer, is owned by the WH Group;67 Legendary Pictures Productions, LLC, is owned by the Wanda Group,68 which also has held a significant stake in AMC Theatres, the largest chain in America.69

next. My dad called this imprinting. In the 1980s he’d have NASA leaders, IBM executives, educators, and athletes write down specific memories of strong performances on note cards and put a plan in place to review and relive them. He understood that words trigger pictures, which impact emotions, which lead to performances. He’d teach me this process as flick back/flick up—flick back to a past moment, and then flick up and apply that past behavior to a future moment.

Some of the incompatibilities could not be corrected without Microsoft’s help. When we asked Microsoft to fix those incompatibilities for which we didn’t have the source code, we feared that our request would be turned down or at least acted on slowly because of their relationship with IBM. We learned, however, that Microsoft was happy to work with us and have our help in identifying problems and verifying fixes.

The underlying architectures adopted by IBM Watson and AlphaGo have shown super-humans strengths and sub-humans limitations.

The odds of success (surviving and reestablishing a profitable trajectory) in redefinition are extremely low, less than one in ten. The exceptions—such as Marvel Entertainment (from comics to movies), IBM (from hardware to services and software), and De Beers (from mining to consumer focus and retail)—were able to rebuild their core model around “hidden assets,” deep strengths in the core business that had not been previously utilized.

a banker named Jean Liu when she found herself stranded with three unhappy children on a street corner in Beijing, midst a heavy rain, unable to flag down a taxi. Liu had been raised on tech—her father founded Lenovo, which purchased IBM’s personal computer business and is now the world’s largest PC maker—and she had done postgraduate work in computer science at Harvard.

On the other hand, while the investment funds had substantial investments and substantial gains in IBM, the combination of its apparently high price and the impossibility of being certain about its rate of growth prevented them from having more than, say, 3% of their funds in this wonderful performer. Hence the effect of this excellent choice on their overall results was by no means decisive. Furthermore, many—if not most—of their investments in computer-industry companies other than IBM appear to have been unprofitable. From these two broad examples we draw two morals for our readers: Obvious prospects for physical growth in a business do not translate into obvious profits for investors. The experts do not have dependable ways of selecting and concentrating on the most promising companies in the most promising industries.

As I reflect upon some of the exceptional leaders I’ve studied in my research, I’m struck by how Covey’s principles are manifested in many of their stories. Let me focus on one of my favorite cases, Bill Gates. It’s become fashionable in recent years to attribute the outsize success of someone like Bill Gates to luck, to being in the right place at the right time. But if you think about it, this argument falls apart. When Popular Electronics put the Altair computer on its cover, announcing the advent of the first-ever personal computer, Bill Gates teamed up with Paul Allen to launch a software company and write the BASIC programming language for the Altair. Yes, Gates was at just the right moment with programming skills, but so were other people—students in computer science and electrical engineering at schools like Cal Tech, MIT, and Stanford; seasoned engineers at technology companies like IBM, Xerox, and HP; and scientists in government research laboratories. Thousands of people could’ve done what Bill Gates did at that moment, but they didn’t. Gates acted upon the moment. He dropped out of Harvard, moved to Albuquerque (where the Altair was based), and wrote computer code day and night. It was not the luck of being at the right moment in history that separated Bill Gates, but his proactive response to being at the right moment (Habit 1: Be Proactive).

decline, downsizing, near death, desperation, bet the company, and revival that characterizes so many corporate histories (such as Nokia, IBM, Procter & Gamble, and many others).

We have another problem. We don’t have much warehouse space. So if the dealers wait too long to start ordering, we won’t have a place to put the finished computers.” I ask, “Can we rent additional space somewhere?” Vieau answers, “We can try, and in the meantime we can store some in 18-wheeler trailers.” And store them in trailers we did. Before we were through, there were almost twenty trailers parked in various locations around Houston.

Моя жена говорила: — Комплексы есть у всех. Ты не исключение. У тебя комплекс моей неполноценности.

Проснулись мы с братом у его знакомой. Накануне очень много выпили. Состояние ужасающее. Вижу, мой брат поднялся, умылся. Стоит у зеркала, причесывается. Я говорю: — Неужели ты хорошо себя чувствуешь? — Я себя ужасно чувствую. — Но ты прихорашиваешься! — Я не прихорашиваюсь, — ответил мой брат. — Я совсем не прихорашиваюсь. Я себя… мумифицирую.

Those of a future generation will one day look back on printed books with the same benign and befuddled expressions that we use when we look at floppy disks or those colossal IBM mainframes with spinning reels of tape that you see in the background of the villain’s lair in James Bond movies. Books are bulky, and an individual book doesn’t hold much data compared to what an e-reader can hold.

The principle of conservation of boson number inside a system is seen to follow directly from the Abstraction Model. The IBMs are seen to obey the Laws of Physical Transaction that follows from Zero-Postulation. The chaotic superfields at the requisite scaling-ratio yields necessary equation-parameters needed to describe them at that given scaling-ratio. This is seen to be independent of the choice of scale, but at smaller scaling-ratios, we have less loss of information. At a higher scale, we seem to have less number of parameters required to describe them.

http://www.centurylink.com/business/a....

Since we built such sophisticated business machines, people tended to think of IBM as a model of order and logic—a totally streamlined organization in which we developed plans rationally and carried them out with utter precision. I never thought for a minute that was really the case.

RPX's current members include such giants as Apple, Amazon, Cisco, Dell, eBay, Google, Hewlett-Packard, HTC, IBM, Intel, LG, Microsoft, Oracle, Samsung, Sony, T-Mobile, and Verizon.

comprehensivist.” (IBM’s Grundy coined this term. He’s also president of the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative, a set of large employers, provider groups, and private insurers looking to transform health care.) Comprehensivists are skilled project

(When the company was finally broken up in the 1980s to satisfy antitrust regulators, it was worth more than the combined worth of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola, and employed a million people.) Bell moved to Washington, D.C., became

Berkshire Hathaway Public Holdings April 4, 2012 Company Holding Value Stake The Coca-Cola Company (KO) $14.69 billion 8.8% International Business Machines (IBM) $13.17 billion 5.4% Wells Fargo (WFC) $12.99 billion 13.0% American Express (AXP) $8.69 billion 2.8% Proctor & Gamble $5.16 billion 2.8% Kraft Foods $3.32 billion 4.9% Wal-Mart Stores $2.36 billion 1.1% ConocoPhillips $2.22 billion 2.3% U.S. Bancorp $2.16 billion 2.3% Johnson & Johnson $1.90 billion 1.1% Moody’s Corp $1.20 billion 12.8% DIRECTV $995 million 2.9% Washington Post Co. $645 million 22.4% M&T Bank Corp $465 million 4.3% Costco Wholesale Corp $386 million 1.0% Visa Inc. $341 million 0.35% Intel Corp. $321 million 0.23% CVS Caremark $315 million 0.55% USG Corp $283 million 16.2% General Dynamics $281 million 1.1% DaVita Inc. $233 million 2.9% Dollar General $210 million 1.3% Torchmark $208 million 4.2% MasterCard Inc. $174 million 0.3% Verisk Analytics $162 million 1.9% General Electric $153 million 0.07% Sanofi SA $153 million 0.15% Liberty Media $149 million 1.4% United Parcel Service $114 million 0.15% GlaxoSmithKline $68 million 0.06% Bank of New York Mellon $43 million 0.15% Ingersoll Rand $26 million 0.2% Gannett $26 million 0.73% Source: CNBC, Warren Buffet Watch.

In 1957, IBM’s weight was two-thirds of the technology sector; in 2013, IBM was only the third largest in a sector that contains 70 firms.

Since its founding in 1911 up until 1993, IBM had never laid off a single employee. Akers needed to, but somehow couldn’t bring himself to do it. The company needed a hatchet man and John Akers was no hatchet man.

Microsoft’s cloud revenue jumped 164 percent in the second quarter, while IBM’s surged 86 percent, according to a report last week by Synergy Research Group. Amazon is still way ahead, with $962 million in cloud revenue, compared with $370 million for Microsoft and IBM’s $259 million, Synergy estimates. But Amazon’s growth rate, at 49 percent, was only slightly ahead of the torrid 45 percent pace of the cloud market as a whole.

IBM estimates that 90 percent of the world’s data was created in the last two years. As co-authors Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt stated in their exquisite photo book, The Human Face of Big Data, “Now, in the first day of a baby’s life today, the world creates 70 times the data contained in the entire Library of Congress.

IBM estimates that 90 percent of the world’s data was created in the last two years.

IBM had its origins in Jacquard’s endeavours in Revolutionary France. And indeed IBM is, indeed, a direct descendant of the work that went on in Jacquard’s workshop during the last years of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth.

Алешковский уверял: – В Москве репетируется балет, где среди действующих лиц есть Крупская. Перед балериной, исполняющей эту роль, стоит нелегкая хореографическая задача. А именно, средствами пластики выразить базедову болезнь.

The 1950s witnessed especially rapid expansion of electronic and electrical firms, of tobacco, soft drink, and food-processing companies, and of the chemical, plastics, and pharmaceutical industries. IBM blossomed as a leader in the computer business, soon to become a guiding star of the American economy.

Kildall, the innovator, followed his passion for technical excellence and was shocked that IBM wouldn’t follow him. Gates, the imitator, took his cues from IBM every step of the way, because he believed that following Big Blue was the smartest way to follow the money.

Many companies worked hard at going cheap on IT, and they eventually took a beating for it. Names like Sears, Sprint, BestBuy, and, more recently, Target, come to mind.

Last year she began distributing black plastic cards bearing the phrase “One Purpose: Be essential” to IBM’s roughly 50,000 managers and has been known to demand to see them as she walks the halls.

If you ever wonder how the Tea Party would run America, just look at IBM.

Between September 1969 and May 1970, there were at least 250 bombings linked to white-dominated radical groups in the United States. This was an average of almost one per day. (The government placed the number at six times as high.) Favorite targets were ROTC buildings, draft boards, induction centers, and other federal offices. In February 1970 bombs exploded at the New York headquarters of Socony Mobil, IBM, and General Telephone and Electronics.

Apple’s announcement that it was teaming up with IBM raised a few eyebrows. The pair will create apps for businesses that draw on Apple’s functionality and IBM’s cloud-computing and security expertise. It is Apple’s first significant thrust into corporate services and amounts to a sea change in its philosophy; Steve Jobs once described IBM as representing the “computer Dark Ages”.

http://www.batteriesmall.com.au/ibm-l... IBM ThinkPad X60 Series Laptop Battery Replacement

Say Bank A is holding $10 million in A-minus-rated IBM bonds. It goes to Bank B and makes a deal: we’ll pay you $50,000 a year for five years and in exchange, you agree to pay us $10 million if IBM defaults sometime in the next five years—which of course it won’t, since IBM never defaults. If Bank B agrees, Bank A can then go to the Basel regulators and say, “Hey, we’re insured if something goes wrong with our IBM holdings. So don’t count that as money we have at risk. Let us lend a higher percentage of our capital, now that we’re insured.” It’s a win-win. Bank B makes, basically, a free $250,000. Bank A, meanwhile, gets to lend out another few million more dollars, since its $10 million in IBM bonds is no longer counted as at-risk capital. That was the way it was supposed to work. But two developments helped turn the CDS from a semisensible way for banks to insure themselves against risk into an explosive tool for turbo leverage across the planet. One is that no regulations were created to make sure that at least one of the two parties in the CDS had some kind of stake in the underlying bond. The so-called naked default swap allowed Bank A to take out insurance with Bank B not only on its own IBM holdings, but on, say, the soon-to-be-worthless America Online stock Bank X has in its portfolio. This is sort of like allowing people to buy life insurance on total strangers with late-stage lung cancer—total insanity. The other factor was that there were no regulations that dictated that Bank B had to have any money at all before it offered to sell this CDS insurance.

Pratt & Whitney, the aerospace manufacturer, now can predict with 97% accuracy when an aircraft engine will need to have maintenance, conceivably helping it run its operations much more efficiently, says Anjul Bhambhri, VP of Big Data at IBM.