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.
The reliable way great conglomerates grew over time was by adding new products and buying new companies. IBM moved from mainframe to PCs.
We can learn from IBM's successful history that you don't have to have the best product to become number one. You don't even have to have a good product.
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.
IBM decided they were going to enter the copying business in 1968.
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.
The typical project design time for a large company like IBM - and they keep track of this - is a little over four years.
I think the idealism has always been marketing. Even back in the early days of Apple and the 'pirate' mentality, they were building a computer that they wanted to differentiate from IBM and Microsoft.
Facebook is a powerful company, yes, but so was IBM.
I think what IBM is excellent at is using their sales and marketing infrastructure to convince people who have asymmetrically less knowledge to pay for something.
