Ibm Quotes

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

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. ~ Garry Kasparov

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. ~ Bobby Lee

A lot of people saved IBM. Yes, I was the leader of that team, but I could never have done it without a group of IBMers helping me. ~ Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.

Both VisiCalc and MultiPlan were available when the IBM PC shipped in October 1981. 1-2-3 didn't hit the market until January 1983. ~ Mitch Kapor

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. ~ Dan Jones

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. ~ Henry Chesbrough

I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very well with it. ~ Larry Wall

I became a door-to-door IBM salesman in 1963, a job I had for six years. But most everyone thought it was a bad idea. Door-to-door salesmen were lower than used-car salesmen or attorneys. ~ James W. Murphy

Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation. They prevent innovation from happening. ~ Steve Jobs

I realized much later in life that the reason this decision between MIT and IBM was so agonizing was because it wasn't really about choosing a career; it was about deciding who I was, which part of myself I wanted to be, and that's the hardest decision any of us has to make. ~ Mike Massimino

I think everybody at IBM knows the early 1990s disaster, and it's in our fabric that you cannot miss the ship. ~ Samuel J. Palmisano

I give permission
for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil. ~ Douglas Crockford

I want to take IBM back to its roots. ~ Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.

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. ~ Ginni Rometty

There are plenty of things I wish I'd known when I decided to quit my position at IBM and work on the idea that later became TaskRabbit. Maybe that's why one of the things I cherish most about being a founder and CEO is the opportunity to offer advice to new entrepreneurs. ~ Leah Busque

If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years. ~ Steve Jobs

In the early IBM team, that was a racially diverse team, a gender-diverse team. ~ Megan Smith

We depend on you to do the right thing; right for both you and the company. It is no exaggeration to say that IBM's reputation is in your hands. ~ Buck Rodgers

In 1951, the Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills published a study titled White Collar: The American Middle Classes.26 Like Ronald Coase, Mills was fascinated by the rise of large managerial corporations. He argued that these firms, in their pursuit of scale and efficiency, had created a vast tier of workers who carried out repetitive, mechanistic tasks that stifled their imagination and, ultimately, their ability to fully participate in society. In short, Mills argued, the typical corporate worker was alienated. For many, that alienation was captured in the warning printed on the Hollerith punch cards that, thanks to IBM and other data processing firms, became ubiquitous symbols and agents of bureaucratized life during the 1950s and 1960s: "Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate. ~ Moises Naim

The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision. ~ Lou Gerstner

RPX's current members include such giants as Apple, Amazon, Cisco, Dell, eBay, Google, Hewlett-Packard, HTC, IBM, Intel, LG, Microsoft, Oracle, Samsung, Sony, T-Mobile, and Verizon. ~ Anonymous

There were IBM logos designed for the film, and there were IBM design consultants working with Kubrick on the layout of the controls and computer screens. ~ Douglas Trumbull

I am so sorry to hear of Asher's passing. I will miss his scientific insight and advice, but even more his humor and stubborn integrity. I remember when one of his colleagues complained about Asher's always rejecting his manuscript when they were sent to him to referee. Asher said in effect, 'You should thank me. I am only trying to protect your reputation.' He often pretended to consult me, a fellow atheist, on matters of religious protocol.

{Charles H. Bennett's letter written to the family of Israeli physicist, Asher Peres} ~ Charles H. Bennett

IBM has research and development; so do Microsoft and Nike and even Jose Andres. But there hasn't been enough R&D on feeding people in the Third World. This has to be part of the process; if not, we'll keep throwing money at the problem instead of investing in true solutions. ~ Jose Andres

(When the company was finally broken up in the 1980s to satisfy antitrust regulators, it was worth more than the combined worth of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola, and employed a million people.) Bell moved to Washington, D.C., became ~ Bill Bryson

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. ~ Geoffrey Hinton

My only explanation for our cheeky ambition is this: Being surrounded by pet-supply e-tailors worth more than IBM has a way of getting your sense of what's possible all out of whack. The old millennium was dying; a better one was on its way. We were in our mid-twenties, and we had no idea what we were doing. But we knew we loved books. And so we set out to write them. ~ Chris Baty

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. ~ Ginni Rometty

Gates has always understood Moore's Law better than anyone else in the industry. If you can make something run at all, get it out there -it may be slow and clunky, but hardware improvements will bail you out. If you wait until it's running perfectly on the hardware already in the field, it will be obsolete before it's released. This philosophy built Microsoft and is the main reason Microsoft won the war IBM declared back in the OS/2 days. ~ Jerry Pournelle

My father worked for IBM. My mother raised us kids. There were six of us, and a couple of extra foster kids at any given time. ~ Steve Coogan

Twenty years ago rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for IBM. ~ George Will

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. ~ Walter Isaacson

When you were a kid, [work in IBM] seemed like an awesome job. I'd get to go to work and have a briefcase. I loved how Dad wore a tie and got a car. I didn't know if all those things came together. I'd see my dad go off to work and we'd wait for him to come home, and we'd all be excited to see him. ~ Jimmy Fallon

IBM is helping to greatly advance and expedite quality sampling while providing our project investigators peace of mind that the information they are gathering is securely stored and protected. ~ H.G.Wells

Technology is something we buy to sell to the customers. Ericsson, Nokia and IBM do technology for a living, so let's give it to them because they know best. It has made the business model of Bharti very, very sustainable. ~ Sunil Mittal

IBM actually followed the recommendations and built a workplace where people can work. (We predict this company will go far.) ~ Tom DeMarco

I was into the Mets because my Dad worked at IBM where he got free Mets tickets, so I was into the Mets ... then I got to 'Saturday Night Live' where my boss has unbelievable N.Y. Yankees tickets, so he invites us to the games. I'm going to all the games, so I might as well root for the team I'm gonna go sit with. ~ Jimmy Fallon

My big dream back then was to buy an IBM Selectric. I still have that dream. I really ought to buy a word-processor. Half the cabbies at Rocky own computers. They tell me they can write failed novels ten times faster on a PC. ~ Gary Reilly

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. ~ Warren Buffett

You were never to say you weren't "fine, thank you - and yourself?" You were supposed to be Heidi. You were supposed to lug goat milk up the hills and not think twice. Heidi did not complain. Heidi did not do things like stand in front of the new IBM photocopier saying, "If this fucking Xerox machine breaks on me one more time, I'm going to slit my wrists. ~ Lorrie Moore

It was not until the appearance of cyberpunk in the 1980s that SF began to grapple in a broadly meaningful way with the reality of computers as something other than giant mainframes tended by crewcut IBM nerds. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Even thirty years later, reflecting back on the competition, Jobs cast it as a holy crusade: "IBM was essentially Microsoft at its worst. They were not a force for innovation; they were a force for evil. They were like ATT or Microsoft or Google is." Unfortunately ~ Walter Isaacson

(Thomas J. Watson Sr. of IBM followed the same rule: "I'm no genius," he said. "I'm smart in spots - but I stay around those spots.") ~ Warren Buffett

And then lo and behold IBM, Apple and Motorola took an ad in all the newspapers, double page ad, and said, announcing the chip that they were now able to manufacture it and that they were going to kill Intel. ~ Arthur Rock

We know unequivocally that the traditional MBA curriculum for running large companies like IBM, GM and Boeing does not work in startups. In fact, it's toxic. ~ Steven Gary Blank

At that time in IBM you had to wear a white shirt, dark pants and a black tie with your badge stapled to your shoulder or something," said Steve Bristow, an engineer. "At Atari the work people did counted more than how they looked. ~ Walter Isaacson

The normal expectancy of the average investor - for example, the pension funds of AT&T or IBM - is 6% for a long time. ~ Charlie Munger

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." ~ Larry Ellison

Throughout his career, Jobs liked to see himself as an enlightened rebel pitted against evil empires, a Jedi warrior or Buddhist samurai fighting the forces of darkness. IBM was his perfect foil. He cleverly cast the upcoming battle not as a mere business competition, ~ Walter Isaacson

Interestingly, differential cryptanalysis was first discovered in the research community in 1990. At this point, the IBM team declared that the attack was known to the designers at least 16 years earlier, and that DES was especially designed to withstand differential cryptanalysis. Finally, ~ Christof Paar

That was an all-purpose IBM 3070. It took up half a room and still did not have enough capacity to do all the jobs demanded of it. ~ Frederik Pohl

In 1996 or so, I bought my first home computer. It was some sort of IBM product. If I was some weird computer nerd, I would be able to tell you all about the ROM and RAM this machine had. All I know is that it was black when every other model was off-white. When I was perusing models with the sales guy who was blathering on and on about what it could do, all I could think was how much better the black would look in my home office than the ugly off-white. I'm that kind of nerd. ~ Jen Mann

Globalised manufacturing and procurement mean that a lot of high-polluting, heavy duty jobs are transferred to China. We will ask major companies, such as Wal-Mart, Microsoft and IBM to put pressure on their Chinese suppliers. ~ Ma Jun

I remember my father banging away on an IBM Selectric in the garage. He wrote his first novels on that machine. I remember its pebbly surface, its cold heft. It made its mark, literally and violently. ~ Jesse Kellerman

We flew down weekly to meet with IBM, but they thought the way to measure software was the amount of code we wrote, when really the better the software, the fewer lines of code. ~ Bill Gates

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. ~ Buck Rodgers

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. ~ Jack Lynch

These guys are fakes. All they've got on their minds is impressing the new girls with the big words they're so proud of, while sticking their hanse up their skirts. And when they graduate,they cut their hair short and march off to work for Mitsubishi or IBM or Fuji Bank. They marry pretty wives who've never read Marx and have kids they give fancy names to that are enough to make you puke. Smash what educational-industrial complex? Don't make me laugh! ~ Haruki Murakami

If Microsoft is the new IBM, Google is the new Microsoft - the defining company of the industry. ~ Mitchell Kapor

Microsoft went into orbit because it had a booster rocket attached to it called IBM. ~ Bill Gates

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. ~ Al Ries

At IBM, a corporation that embodied the ideal of the company man, the sales force gathered each morning to belt out the company anthem, "Ever Onward," and to harmonize on the "Selling IBM" song, set to the tune of "Singin' in the Rain. ~ Susan Cain

My cousin Elroy spent seven years as an IBM taper staring at THINK signs on the walls before he finally got a good idea: He quit. ~ Edward Abbey

My dad used to work at IBM, so we used to get discounts on computers and stuff, and I did have a ThinkPad. ~ Jimmy Fallon

How youMore people will learn about IBM from Wikipedia in the coming years than from IBM itself. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

IBM is a Monozukuri. ~ Mehmet Kececi

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

IBM needed - an enormous sense of urgency. ~ Lou Gerstner

When I arrived at IBM, there were 'Team' signs all around. I asked, 'How do people get paid?' They told me, 'We pay people based on individual performance.' ~ Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.

I later became more interested in equal rights for women in the work place because of what was happening at IBM. One of the women at Remington Rand had previously been a system service girl for IBM during the war. After a system was installed, a system service girl would go out and show the users how it worked. She was the liaison between the users and the computer company. She was married and had been fired to make room for a returning veteran. When the war ended, IBM rehired all of its former employees who had left to join the military, then fired all of the married women with jobs that could be filled by men. ~ Jean Jennings Bartik

Within IBM at that time, growing a beard without getting fired was an indisputable mark of technical genius. In ~ Gerald M. Weinberg

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

My dream was to grow up and get a job at IBM, like my dad. That seemed like a logical dream. ~ Jimmy Fallon

I have always thought of myself as an inventor first and foremost. An engineer. An entrepreneur. In that order. I never thought of myself as an employee. But my first jobs as an adult were as an employee: at IBM, and then at my first start-up. ~ Aaron Patzer

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. ~ Steve Jobs

In December 1989, my mother died very suddenly, and that sparked a re-evaluation of what I was doing, and I realized I was mediocre at everything. I was a mediocre IBM employee, I was a mediocre entrepreneur, I was a mediocre artist. I decided that, although my mom wouldn't be around to see it, I wanted to be great at something. ~ Jim McKelvey

In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one. ~ Tom Watson

People who feared IBM were wrong, ... Technology is ever-changing. ~ Bill Gates

Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republi­can) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 198os, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages. ~ David Graeber

Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization's makeup and success - along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like ... I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value. ~ Lou Gerstner

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. ~ Kevin Rollins

I firmly believe that IBM's size can be used to its advantage. ~ Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.

Inspired by the punched railway tickets of the time, an inventor by the name of Herman Hollerith devised a system of punched manila cards to store information, and a machine, which he called the Hollerith Machine, to count and sort them. Hollerith was awarded a patent in 1889, and the government adopted the Hollerith Machine for the 1890 census. No one had ever seen anything like it. Wrote one awestruck observer, "The apparatus works as unerringly as the mills of the Gods, but beats them hollow as to speed." Another, however, reasoned that the invention was of limited use: "As no one will ever use it but governments, the inventor will not likely get very rich." This prediction, which Hollerith clipped and saved, would not prove entirely correct. Hollerith's firm merged with several others in 1911 to become the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. A few years later it was renamed - to International Business Machines, or IBM. ~ Brian Christian

If you look at any of the big companies, whether it is IBM or L'Oreal, they have a corporate religion and corporate self-image that makes it very difficult for them to execute in different areas. ~ Sandra Lerner

If being the biggest company was a guarantee of success, we'd all be using IBM computers and driving GM cars. ~ James Surowiecki

Fear of foreign domination in India led the Janata Party, in the 1970s, to push for partial Indian ownership of all multinational firms within the country. The result was a spectacular pullback, by companies such as IBM and Coca-Cola, and a stagnant economy. ~ Peter Blair Henry

I had a working mother. She worked for IBM. My dad lived in another town - not very far away, but another town. So food was - I guess food was my friend. ~ John Schneider

I remember having computers at my parents' house growing up. We had different desktop PCs, but my first laptop was an IBM ThinkPad laptop. It was big, bulky, slow and terrible. ~ Scott Michael Foster

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. ~ Mark Hall

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. ~ Ginni Rometty

IBM uses what I like to call the 'hole-in-the-ground technique' to destroy the competition ... IBM digs a big HOLE in the ground and covers it with leaves. It then puts a big POT OF GOLD nearby. Then it gives the call, 'Hey, look at all this gold, get over here fast.' As soon as the competitor approaches the pot, he falls into the pit ~ John C. Dvorak

I've been a Fellow in a number of companies: Xerox, Apple, Disney, HP. There are certain similarities because all the Fellows programs were derived from IBM's, which itself was derived from the MIT 'Institute Professor' program. ~ Alan Kay

There were movies to go see at the Gem, which has long since been torn down; science fiction movies like Gog with Richard Egan and westerns with Audie Murphy (Teddy saw every movie Audie Murphy made at least three times; he believed Murphy was almost a god) and war movies with John Wayne. There were games and endless bolted meals, lawns to mow, places to run to, walls to pitch pennies against, people to clap you on the back. And now I sit here trying to look through an IBM keyboard and see that time, trying to recall the best and the worst of that green and brown summer, and I can almost feel the skinny, scabbed boy still buried in this advancing body and hear those sounds. But ~ Stephen King

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

Kildall, the innovator, followed his passion for technical excellence and was shocked that IBM wouldn't follow him. Gates, the imitator, took his cues from IBM every step of the way, because he believed that following Big Blue was the smartest way to follow the money. ~ Lewis Schiff

I grew up in Dallas, and my dad works for IBM, so I grew up in the environment of Silicon Prairie. ~ Scott Michael Foster

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. ~ Benoit Mandelbrot

Compensation needs to be predominately performance-driven. If CEO compensation was performance-driven, which I believe it was in IBM's case, nobody would ever argue. If the shareholders didn't make billions and billions of dollars, I wouldn't make millions of dollars. ~ Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.

When I was finishing grad school, the hot new PC was the IBM 286. Bulky. Immobile. Expensive. I touched-typed easily and quickly, but nevertheless, I realized that the machine was a chain. ~ Jane Lindskold