On 19/06/2013 11:14 PM, John Gilmore wrote:
I should perhaps have written "failure to come to terms with
disruptive technology".
Let's not forget IBMs "failure" to foresee the growth explosion of PCs
in the 90s. Lack of vision and poor management gifted microsoft the
opportunity
to become a market leader who constantly outmanoeuvred IBM (anybody
still running OS/2?). It took strong leadership from
Gerstner to turn around a sinking ship.
Times change, and to quote (or misquote) Darwin "It is not the strongest
of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It
is the one that is most adaptable to change."
Microsoft knows very well that the PCs days are numbered and they're
adapting. It's worth noting that Mark Shuttleworth recently closed
Ubuntu Bug #1
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1/comments/1834.
Certainly it is possible, albeit uncommon, for an organization to come
to terms with new, disruptive technology. Failures to do so may well,
however, be more frequent.
Retreat from the unfamiliar, back into the familiar, is common. I
suspect that we are all guilty of it from time to time; and terms like
'good management' and 'bad management' describe outcomes without being
diagnostic.
Olsen was a remarkable man; and in DEC he created a remarkable if not
a long-lived organization. Many, many years ago, as I was introduced
to the DEC salesman (sic) with whom I was supposed to work to
interface a DEC and an IBM system, I noticed the rat ring he was
wearing and judged, rashly but in the event correctly, that he would
be easy to work with.
John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA
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