by theologic | 2025-09-15 02:17:20+00:00
It's always interesting to see these types of articles with a bunch of people pontificating about what was or wasn't happening at IBM. I started my career at IBM and had the chance to engage with the Boca Raton group and the PC division there, working as an internal supplier within IBM. The idea that the PC Group was somehow destroyed by "antibodies" is ridiculous on its face—this notion is often spoken by people who have no real background with the group or a true understanding of what was going on.

As Patrick Lencioni has often said, we have things reported as strategy, when it turns out to be people issues. A lot of what happened at IBM only makes sense if you were there.

I'll list some things here, though since I'm late to the conversation, I’m not sure how much it will be observed. However, perhaps an IBMer who was with the PC Company will come across this and add a few more alternatives or supporting facts.

1. IBM was a wildly diverse place culturally. We had almost half a million employees worldwide. As with any large corporation, you could find divergent views—anyone could find a person or two to support anything they wanted to claim about the company. However, the PC division was generally well regarded. Sure, you can find somebody who said something about "antibodies", but you can find a lot more who would say that’s ridiculous. I tend more toward the latter than the former.

2. Don Estridge was a bit of a cowboy. He did love being down in Florida, which gave him the ability to move quickly. Still, I would say IBM allowed for its “wild ducks”, and while the PC group was one of the more obvious successes, it was not IBM’s only success. Estridge died in a well-publicized airplane accident at Dallas Fort Worth. I don't think most people understand how much cultural impact this had on the group. Although it could be debated, I do believe we could say it was as if Bill Gates or Steve Jobs had been taken out of their company. The amazing thing about the PC group is that it didn’t collapse after his death.

3. The single most destructive thing IBM did was thinking they could take the PC group out of Boca and transport it to Research Triangle Park. After it moved to RTP, I got to work there with many of the group’s core members. They consistently described how the move was traumatic to virtually every aspect of a team that was truly world-class. (Another issue: There was also a development decision in Boca that some decried—some forward-thinking was shelved—but I wasn’t heavily involved in that, and it wasn’t so universal.)

4. I was in the midst of the turmoil as IBM reached the midlife of the PC in RTP. By that stage, we had given up on the idea of clear, proprietary closed systems. Yet at the same time, we were doing some excellent engineering and marketing—we were finally winning awards from PC magazines for the desktops, and people already loved our laptops. But we were clearly hamstrung. Without going deep into details, it’s clear in today’s economy that certain business units serve different purposes. The PC Division was expected to make a lot of money while paying what was internally called “the blue tax.” In other words, corporate hit us with effective tax rates and metrics that basically made it impossible to compete with Compaq or Dell. What most people don’t realize is that one of the biggest impacts of selling the group to Lenovo was the removal of the blue tax. Many key U.S. development team members stayed with the company, and though Lenovo was committed to eventually moving true development headquarters to China, it would have collapsed without an incredibly dedicated group of IBMers who were unfailingly unselfish. There was something about the culture—dedication to the team was one of the most important things you could do, even after the group had been sold to Lenovo.

On reflection, if Estridge never died, and if the division had never moved from Boca, the computing industry would be very different as being apart of what happened.