Between 1971 and 1975, IBM investigated the feasibility of a new revolutionary line of products designed to make obsolete all existing products in order to re-establish its technical supremacy. This effort, known as the Future Systems project, was terminated by IBM's top management in 1975, but had consumed most of the high-level technical planning and design resources during five years, thus jeopardizing progress of the existing product lines (although some elements of FS were later incorporated into actual products).Or...
Between 2002 and 2006, IBM investigated the feasibility of a new revolutionary line of products designed to make obsolete all existing products in order to re-establish its technical supremacy. This effort, known as the Workplace project, was terminated by IBM's top management in 2007, but had consumed most of the high-level technical planning and design resources during five years, thus jeopardizing progress of the existing product lines (although some elements of Workplace were later incorporated into actual products).Believe it or not, the first one is straight out of Wikipedia. All I did was change the dates and the name of the project to come up with the second.
The scope of the Future Systems project was very different than Workplace (FS sought to make all existing computers obsolete; Workplace just wanted to do the same to Notes and Domino [yes, that is an editorial comment]) but both left IBM scrambling to salvage something from their efforts. Future Systems eventually led to the System/38, which evolved into the AS/400. Workplace yielded Expeditor, which is the framework underpinning the current Notes 8 release. Time will tell where that ends up.
Even though both efforts had some positive benefit I'm still left wondering why such vast amounts of time and resources are being spent on distractions that sometimes take decades to recover from. Innovation is one thing, bending your existing customers over a barrel just because you want to maintain or achieve market dominance has proven to be an unwise move. Hopefully IBM will eventually learn from that.
I think its not a vicious cycle, but the future repeating itself
ReplyDeleteThose who do not study the past are doomed to repeat it. In this case, most likely, no one remembers those days.
ReplyDeleteI have no doubt, internally, some skunk works projects go on for years.
Not to forget IBM's Late 80's, Most of the 90's "Workplace OS" project
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_OS
So focused on replaceing OS/2 with something new and wonderful that they completely forgot to allocate resources to the development of the product people where actually buying.
IBM learned very well not to bet the whole compnay on things like this.
ReplyDeleteNow (hopefully) they've also learned not to bet small (one could argue trivial) parts of it either....
I might should have said, "peripheral" instead of "trivial".
ReplyDelete