Fortunately, by the 1980s there were pockets of radical thought inside IBM that were already agitating for the company to join the open movement. And by the mid-1990s, we’d mounted the massive technical and cultural effort required to repudiate closed computing at IBM and open up our products to interoperate with other industry-leading platforms.

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.

This kind of wrenching cultural change doesn’t happen by executive fiat. As I found, I couldn’t flip a switch and alter behaviors. It was, by any measure, the hardest part of IBM’s transformation, and at times I thought it couldn’t be done.

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

In IBM’s culture of “no”—a multiphased conflict in which units competed with one another, hid things from one another, and wanted to control access to their territory from other IBMers—the foot soldiers were IBM staff people. Instead of facilitating coordination, they manned the barricades and protected the borders.