However, what was also clear was that IBM was paralyzed, unable to act on any predictions, and there were no easy solutions to its problems. The IBM organization, so full of brilliant, insightful people, would have loved to receive a bold recipe for success—the more sophisticated, the more complicated the recipe, the better everyone would have liked it.

It wasn’t going to work that way. The real issue was going out and making things happen every day in the marketplace.

I have always believed a successful company must have a customer/marketplace orientation and a strong marketing organization. That’s why my second step in creating a global enterprise had to be to fix and focus IBM’s marketing efforts.

I think you know the decision a former customer made, and IBM today is providing support for customers who still depend on OS/2.

Many IT companies that have built their businesses on some proprietary product have tried to leap across that chasm. Few have made it across successfully.

I can understand the joke that was going around IBM in the early 1990s: “Products aren’t launched at IBM. They escape.