I spent 9 years at IBM and learned that, indeed, IBM does listen to its customers and try to give them what they want. But I also learned an unwritten rule: Customers should not call on a Wednesday because that ruins two weekends.

At one point, Gerstner said "IBM is the most inwardly directed, process oriented, arrogant company" he ever saw. Well, likely it still is.

Once I got an offer from IBM but turned it down, but with the offer came some advice: "You might think that IBM is an electronics company or a computer company, but you'd be wrong. IBM is a marketing company. IBM would get into the grocery business tomorrow if they saw a good business opportunity.

You might think that in IBM research comes up with new ideas, manufacturing turns them into products, and marketing sells them. Then you would have everything exactly backwards. Instead, marketing sees what they can sell at a profit and has manufacturing make it, and manufacturing goes to research if they need help.

What a product sells for is what the customer is willing to pay, and that has nothing to do with what it cost to make the product. In good cases, the profit margin is large, but at times it may even be negative."

Once I met with some guys who were doing some data analysis for the CEO and top level managers. Their explanation was that long the top managers would meet each year, announce their great results, predict even better results for the next year, and then beat those predictions. Then, for no obvious reason, at the annual meetings the top managers were not meeting their predictions, and that went on and on, for years. The only explanation was that God had ceased to smile on IBM."

Sure, IBM could have done Google. IBM Research was long just awash in people who could have done Google as a fast toy off the backs of their hands. But had they done so, manufacturing and marketing would have ignored the results. Marketing just would not have seen any big, traditional IBM customers in bank and insurance company back office paper pushing asking for a Google. Instead, a Google-like product in Research would have had to have been championed by the CEO or just left to die -- no one else with any product authority would ever touch any such thing.

Google? Well, that's about the Internet. Okay, early on the Internet was ARPANet. Later it was NSFNet, and then, or about then, it was run for NSF by IBM. So, right, in the early days of the Internet, IBM literally was running the whole thing. Or they had the ball in their hands and an open field to the goal line but all by themselves fumbled the ball, dropped the ball, tripped over the ball, fell on the ball, lost the ball, and ended up face down in the mud. Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Page and Brin, Zuck, Bezos, etc. picked up the ball.