The author, a second-generation Wall Street Journal newsman, reports in telling detail the sad story of how IBM went from being one of the world’s most profitable companies in 1980 to posting the world’s largest corporate loss in 1992 and, in a sketchy afterword, brings the tale of the ruined giant up to mid-1994. Carroll interweaves the story of how Microsoft, in the same period, starting as a 32-person nonentity, became one of the top ten US companies, making Bill Gates, its founder and leader, the richest man in America. The book is the story of the meteoric rise and out-of-control fall of the IBM PC, of IBM’s total and continuous mismanagement of the resultant repeated crises, and of the crucial part that Microsoft played in the swift and dramatic decline.
Written in the currently popular journalistic style, the book seems to be the story of an infinity of named personalities with their words, interactions, and personal foibles laid out in excruciating detail. IBM did not cooperate in the book, but Carroll depended on what he had collected during his seven years of covering IBM for the Journal and on the testimonies of hordes of fired IBM people who appeared to be dying to air their former employer’s many mistakes. Microsoft, on the other hand, was cooperative to a fault.
In summary, the IBM PC that Bill Love created at Frank Cary’s bold insistence led to wild and excessively encouraging profits in the early 1980s, but at the expense of IBM’s core mainframe business. Although IBM’s executives actually saw most of their problems and had plenty of opportunities to move from the old, increasingly profitless, traditional business to the new, extremely profitable PC business, they were incapable of changing themselves and their beloved company, which was, after all, the most profitable, the most admired, and the best company in the history of the world, offering status, comfortable luxury, and lifetime employment. Why change? The problems of the culturally gridlocked company showed up most vividly in software, where IBM considered itself to be the world leader but where Microsoft managed to snatch and hold the PC software market. Carroll tells how Gates did this, often with the inadvertent aid of those at IBM who hated and denigrated him and his unconventional hacker ways, which were in dramatic contradiction to IBM’s gridlocked bureaucracy.
Carroll summarizes the distinction between the giant and the companies that clobbered it in these sentences: “The Silicon Valley companies were just driven by a purer emotion than IBM was: greed.… At IBM, people wanted to be important, not rich. Executives wanted big staffs, lots of employees, access to the corporate jet, a title. People down in the trenches were conditioned to want security. Neither security nor the desire for importance translated well into greed.”
While Bill Gates is clearly the hero required for this kind of narrative of conflicting personalities, Carroll appears to have chosen John Akers, the last traditional IBM chief executive, as his principal villain. While he names and gives the career and life details of many lesser IBM villains, some misguided, some stupid, some unlucky, and some merely frozen in the IBM culture, none individually appear to have done as much harm as Akers, although all their actions, taken in the aggregate, may have been of even greater significance.
The book is essential to an understanding of the details and chronology of this phase of the history of computing and IBM, but it is journalism, close to the style and content of People magazine. I can recommend it to those who like a good dramatic story, a cast of thousands, and an excess of insignificant detail. While I am sure that what Carroll reports is true, the definitive history of the period must await an author with more distance, more time, more judgment, more insight, less passion, and a better grasp of the technology, a subject that Carroll rather neglects. The index is inadequate, and the terminal “where are they now” page lists far too few of the players.
