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The Computer Blues
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11732 |
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BOOK WORLD
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4 / 1987 |
4,089 Words |
| Author
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Robert L. Ashenhurst
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LESSONS
An Autobiography
An Wang, with Eugene Linden
Reading, Mass.: Addison- Wesley Publishing,
1986
BIG BLUE
IBM'S Use and Abuse of Power
Richard Thomas DeLamarter
New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.,
1986
In the firmament of the computer business, International Business Machines Corporation and Wang Laboratories are both stars, albeit of different magnitudes. Both are Fortune 500 companies - IBM has $50 billion in sales and 400,000 employees, and Wang $2.5 billion in sales and 30,000 employees. In recent years both have been, in separate ways and on separate exchanges, darlings of Wall Street. And at this time, the early part of 1987, both are in trouble. The recent publication of Big Blue and Lessons may be welcomed as possible insights into the origin and character of their separate falls from grace.
IBM was started in 1924 by Thomas J. Watson, who gained control of, and then reorganized, its predecessor, Computing-Recording-Tabulating Company. Wang Labs was started in 1951 by An Wang, on a shoestring (a basic patent and a few hundred dollars personal savings). In 1924 there was no computer business as such; IBM was mainly in the tabulating (punched-card) machine business until the introduction of the IBM 701, its first commercial electronic computer, in 1952. Likewise, Wang began in the electronic and magnetics business, and did not produce its first successful general-purpose computer, the Wang 2200, until 1972. The IBM 701 was what was then called a "large-scale" digital computer, nowadays called a mainframe. By the time of the introduction of the Wang 2200, the technology had made it possible to incorporate a similar degree of computing power in a much smaller package, the minicomputer. Today one must contend with a further level of compactness, the microcomputer.
Each book is about the success of the company with which it deals. The two works, however, could not be more different in style and approach. Big Blue, as its subtitle suggests, is written from an adversarial perspective; Richard Thomas DeLamarter was a senior economist for the Justice Department during the time of the U.S. government's antitrust suit against IBM. Lessons, as its subtitle indicates, is a personal narrative; An Wang, founder and still chairman of Wang Laboratories, writes with author and journalist Eugene Linden of his experience in founding and nurturing the company that bears his name. Big Blue contains a plethora of detail - technical as well as financial. The reader must be highly motivated indeed to plow through it. Lessons is deceptively easy reading; the style, superficially resembling that of other autobiographical works put out by highly successful businesspeople in recent years, is so relaxed that it is difficult to spot where the rocky going was on the road to the top.
One reason these books might be interesting to some readers is that they focus on a current American preoccupation - competition. For DeLamarter, the crushing of competition is the key to IBM's success: "Despite what the company or its supporters may claim, IBM's power has less to do with
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