Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [9]
“So here we have a machine that’s as fast as your brain, or close,” he said. “But it doesn’t think the way we think. So what would be an appropriate grand challenge that would have high visibility and excite people?” He didn’t remember the idea coming from Lickel or hearing about the Fishkill dinner. In fact, Horn thought the idea might have come from him. In any case, he liked it—and promptly ran into resistance. “The general response was negative,” he recalled. “People said, ‘It can’t be done. It’s too much of a publicity stunt. The only reason that you’re interested in it is because it’s a show on TV.’” But Horn thought that building a savvy answering machine was the ideal challenge for IBM. While he maintained that he viewed the grand challenge as pure research, it also made plenty of sense.
IBM’s business had undergone a radical transformation over the course of Horn’s thirty-year career at the company. As late as the 1970s, IBM ruled the computer industry. It launched its first computers for business in 1952. But it was its breakthrough mainframe in 1964, Series 360, that established a single standard of computing in business, industry, and science. IBM pitched itself as a safe, if expensive, bet for companies looking to computerize. Its buttoned-down sales and consulting teams spread a compelling message around the world: “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” Big Blue, a name derived from the massive blue mainframes it sold, grew so big that its rivals, including Sperry, Burroughs, Honeywell, and four other companies, came to be known as the Seven Dwarfs. During this time, IBM researchers at Saarinen’s edifice and at other labs around the world churned out an array of new technologies. They came up with magnetic strips for credit cards and floppy disks for computer data storage. Yet it was computers that drove the business. When Horn arrived at IBM Research in 1979, the greatest threat to IBM appeared to be a decade-long antitrust complaint brought by the U.S. Justice Department. It alleged that IBM had violated the Sherman Act by attempting to monopolize the fast-growing industry for business computers. Whether or not Big Blue had broken the law, its dominance was beyond question.
By 1982, when the Justice Department dropped the suit for lack of evidence, the computer world was shifting under Big Blue’s feet. The previous year, IBM had unveiled its first personal computer, or PC. Priced at $1,500, it provided both legitimacy and a standard for the young industry. Early on, as corporate customers gobbled up PCs, it seemed as though IBM would go on to dominate this next stage of computing. But there was a crucial difference between these desktop machines and the mainframes. Nearly every component of the mainframes, including their processors and software, was made by IBM. In the lingo of the industry, the computers were vertically integrated. This was not the case with PCs. In order to get to market quickly at a low price, IBM built them from off-the-shelf technology—microprocessors from Intel and a rudimentary operating system, MS-DOS, from a Seattle startup called Microsoft. Since the PC had commodity innards, it took no time at all for newcomers, including Compaq and Taiwan’s Acer, to plug them into cheaper “IBM-compatible” computers, or clones. IBM found itself slugging it out with a slew of upstarts while Intel and Microsoft ran away with the profits and grew into titans. Big Blue was in decline, falling faster than most people imagined. And in 1992, the vast industrial behemoth stunned the business world by registering a $4.97 billion loss, the largest in U.S. history at the time. In the