20 years in IT history: Connectivity

There was no reason to bet against IBMIBM. It had the classiest brand, an immense promotional budget and some of the best engineers in the world. Yet, incredibly, after several years of very expensive triage, the PS/2 initiative crashed and burned. The failure was a body blow to IBM and its standing in the industry. Alles zu IBM auf CIO.de

What went wrong The fingers of blame pointed in every direction (silly ads, pricing), but the truth is the PS/2 was the wrong product for a market coalescing around connectivity. Sizzling performance is nice but not essential in a connector because performance is measured against the entire system, not any one part. Blatant assertions of ownership-this is my toy-threatened compatibility, the key virtue in a connection machine.

IBM failed to understand the important difference between a connection machine and a computing machine. And it paid the price.

1988: Next and OOPs

The connectivity story continued with 's Next. When you bought a Next, you got a piece of great (but completely closed) hardware (which, of course, looked totally cool) and an operating system built around a programming philosophy new to micros: Object Oriented Programming.