Ibm Quotes

Just think, IBM and DEC in the same room, and we did it.

This kind of intense loyalty, then, became the well-spring of the IBM spirit, the family spirit as it was called.

Twenty years ago rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for IBM.

The next thing is: we can make IBM even better. We brought IBM back but we're gunning for leadership.

IBM has taken our valuable trade secrets and given them away to Linux.

I want to take IBM back to its roots.

IBM needed - an enormous sense of urgency.

The manuals we got from IBM would show examples of programs and I knew I could do a heck of a lot better than that. So I thought I might have some talent.

Some people speak of the Akashic Records as if they were on an IBM mainframe that's out there somewhere near the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game; it is the game.

The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.

And the reason I came to IBM was I think - I always say at a really early age, I learned you've got to be passionate about what you do. No matter what it is, you put too much, your heart and soul in it, you have to be passionate about it. You make too many sacrifices.

It was a very big gamble. I lost my job in France, I received a job in which was extremely uncertain, how long would IBM be interested in research, but the gamble was taken and very shortly afterwards, I had this extraordinary fortune of stopping at Harvard to do a lecture and learning about the price variation in just the right way.

The typical project design time for a large company like IBM - and they keep track of this - is a little over four years.

You look at these past predictions like there's only a market in the world for five computers [as allegedly said by IBM founder Thomas Watson] and you realize it's not a good idea to predict too far into the future.

Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what's good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.

You cannot have companies where many of the largest ones lose money indefinitely without someone finally waving the white flag, and IBM is the most recent example of that.

Before I liked to write, I liked to type. I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter.

Every disruptive innovation is powered by a simplifying technology, and then the technology has to get embedded in a different kind of a business model. The first two decades of digital computing were characterized by the huge mainframe computers that filled a whole room, and they had to be operated by PhD Computer Scientists. It took the engineers at IBM about four years to design these mainframe computers because there were no rules. It was an intuitive art and just by trial and error and experimentation they would evolve to a computer that worked.

I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company.

Even IBM can't stand in the way of progress... for more than a decade.

When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.

What I'm trying to do is deliver results, not promises; results, not vision; results, not concepts. The world is cynical about IBM's promises.

I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.

IBM's long-standing mantra is 'Think.' What has always made IBM a fascinating and compelling place for me, is the passion of the company, and its people, to apply technology and scientific thinking to major societal issues.

It's the first company to build the mental position that has the upper hand, not the first company to make the product. IBM didn't invent the computer; Sperry Rand did. But IBM was the first to build the computer position in the prospect's mind.

If you gave me the choice of being CEO of General Electric or IBM or General Motors, you name it, or delivering papers, I would deliver papers. I would. I enjoyed doing that. I can think about what I want to think. I don't have to do anything I don't want to do.

At IBM everybody sells! Every employee has been trained to think that the customer comes first - everybody from the CEO, to the people in finance, to the receptionists, to those who work in manufacturing.

Overall, OS/2's problems fall into two categories: IBM and Microsoft.

IBM doesn't want its people to get frustrated and restless because it has them reaching for carrots they can't quit

There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

If the DHS insists, as bureaucracies are apt to do, that open-source must be certified via a sanctioned, formal process, it will interfere with the informal process of open-source itself. It seems to me the DHS is trying to turn an open-source development project into a Microsoft (or IBM or Oracle) software development project. And we know what that means: more, not fewer, errors -- security and otherwise.

I've been head of strategy at IBM and together with my colleagues built our five-year plan. My priorities are going to be to continue to execute on that.

You know, IBM was almost knocked out of the box by other types of computer software and manufacturing.

Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs.

The Chinese are quite entrepreneurial. Remember when Lenovo bought IBM's PC division. It was said that China didn't need a brand name, China didn't need to buy Lenovo to get into the PC business, I remember reading a one-liner somewhere which struck me as quite possibly true, it said the one thing that the Chinese had not been able to copy or figure out was the way, in terms of systems, that Americans - it probably would be true for Europeans as well - that Americans install and live by their management systems, while China is still quite half-assed. Perhaps that is a true statement.

And so when I moved to IBM, I moved because I thought I could apply technology. I didn't actually have to do my engineer - I was an electrical engineer, but I could apply it. And that was when I changed. And when I got there, though, I have to say, at the time, I really never felt there was a constraint about being a woman. I really did not.

IBM customers of any size can now rest assured that Double-Take, the most innovative, flexible and reliable data protection solution on the market, is proven to integrate easily into their IBM infrastructure.

Why IBM? We have tremendous expertise. One of the reasons we can drive phenomenal efficiency around the world is because we've made IBM an e-business.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.

Like IBM, the company [Microsoft] seems to have been spooked by the federal antitrust action against it and became increasingly sclerotic and less inventive.

Artificial intelligence uses a complex set of rules - algorithms - to get to a conclusion. A computer has to calculate its way through all those rules, and that takes a lot of processing. So AI works best when a small computer is using it on a small problem - your car's anti-lock brakes are based on AI. Or you need to use a giant computer on a big problem - like IBM using a room-size machine to compete against humans on Jeopardy in 2011.

It was an impressive achievement, of course, and a human achievement by the members of the IBM team, but Deep Blue was only intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better.

Describing one competitive advantage of IBM's Deep Blue chess computer. It has no fear.

I went to Tokyo three years ago. It was a job, though. I did an ad campaign for IBM, so they flew me out there to take pictures of me. It was IBM Global. It went to Australia, France, London, all over the world. But I think the ad campaign was a failure, because of me.

We think the managed security services opportunity is enormous and so we have been an active participant and probably the largest firm in this space outside of an IBM or EDS, which does large outsourcing contracts.

My father had to flee from what is today Pakistan when he was a child, and he became a manager at IBM, and any item of consumption he would acquire was a direct measurement of his success in life. But that same equation wasn't going to work for me - I was quite clear about that in my early teens.

He’s totally different from the typical jock. He has no ego. That’s unique for someone with such accolades. His strength comes from a higher power. You can’t explain Steve Largent by computer – he doesn’t belong on an NFL field. You put his size and speed in an IBM computer up in Silicon Valley, it would chew up his data card and laugh.

It's fascinating as we continue to innovate and lead the way in both the application space and the database space. In the very beginning, people said you couldn't make relational databases fast enough to be commercially viable. I thought we could, and we were the first to do it. But we took tremendous abuse until IBM said, "Oh yeah, this stuff is good."

No one has a monopoly on knowledge the way that, say, IBM had in the 1960s in computing, or that Bell Labs had through the 1970s in communications. When useful knowledge exists in companies of all sizes and also in universities, non-profits and individual minds, it makes sense to orient your innovation efforts to accessing, building upon and integrating that external knowledge into useful products and services.