Ron Mallis, in replying to my LO1733 asked...-
> On the face of it, it's unclear IBM was, in fact, allowing its customers
> to teach it anything (and that's even assuming IBM was asking -- and
> asking for -- the right questions). And are you suggesting that it was
> IBM's customers that went down the rat-hole?
No, I'm suggesting that IBM's customers were mainframe-driven in
an era of shift to LAN-based systems. Because IBM had spent the
past two or three decades getting closer and closer to the customers,
they were ill-adapted to follow the new market emergence, despite
their success with the initial IBM PC, XT and AT. The minute those
systems looked like they were about to grow to challenge the System/3,
RS/6000, AS/400 and System 370 markets, they were truncated by
internal political battles. Buying Lotus is a tacit admission by IBM
that it's old way (under an older regime) was wrong, and they
have too many entrenched bureaucrats, still, to mount an original
foray into the new 'groupware' market (and they've tried, egad how
they've tried, with Person-to-Person, and many other products with
luckwarm field sales support).
In short, the better atuned that a vendor is to their existing customer
base, the more ill-adapted they are to the decay of that market and
the emergence of competing markets. Sometimes, you have to
ignore what your customers are telling you and take another path
in self-preservation.
-- Carol Anne (Deep Woods Technology) Carol Anne Ogdin <Carol_Anne_Ogdin@deepwoods.com>