[HN Gopher] Remembering Lou Gerstner
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Remembering Lou Gerstner
Author : thm
Score : 48 points
Date : 2025-12-28 18:43 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (newsroom.ibm.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (newsroom.ibm.com)
| cogogo wrote:
| Zero intention to speak badly of the deceased... Just an anecdote
| - I started at IBM in the early 2000s right out of college. At
| the time his immediate legacy was the divestiture of a big chunk
| of IBMs real estate. As a new IBMer that meant hot-desking if I
| went to the office and a very liberal work from home policy 20
| years before its time. I love work from home but experienced
| first hand how hard it can be on young people. In my first
| professional job I maybe saw my bosses (yes plural because of org
| changes and the IBM matrix) twice a year.
| echelon wrote:
| > In my first professional job I maybe saw my bosses (yes
| plural because of org changes and the IBM matrix) twice a year.
|
| Did this work at all? How did you feel throughout it? What
| about your colleagues?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I did a couple of internships at IBM (1995 in Boca Raton and
| 2000 in Hawthorn). It was hard on young people even if you were
| in the office. You'd see your manager occasionally, but...it
| just felt like a place lacking in energy and was way too big
| corp to be very interesting. IBM is a big reason I delayed
| starting my career via grad school, a post doc in Switzerland,
| and then working for Microsoft in China of all places. I just
| didn't want the mundane techie experience, and was sort of so
| traumatized by IBM that I searched for different paths.
| jmclnx wrote:
| And IIRC, he had IBM invest in Linux around 1999. That paved the
| way for eventual acquisition of Red Hat (for good or bad) :)
| jonathaneunice wrote:
| It paved the way for a lot more than that. At a time open
| source in general, and Linux in particular, did not have much
| corporate buy-in, IBM signaled "we back this" and "we're
| investing in this" in substantial ways that corporate IT
| executives could hear and act upon. That was a pre-cloud, pre-
| hyperscaler era when "enterprise IT" was the generally
| understood "high end" of the market, and IBM ruled that arena.
| IBM backing Linux and open source paved the way for a large
| swath of the industry--customers, software vendors,
| channel/distribution partners, yadda yadda--to do likewise.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| agree - and the big industry consortium building `gcc` was
| already proving itself
| rilindo wrote:
| I got complicated feelings about that. He did help pave the way
| for Linux, but he also killed OS/2.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| OS/2 never had a chance. I was working at Radio Shack at the
| time that IBM was trying to sell Aptivas with OS/2. No one
| wanted it.
|
| It was just weird to people. Microsoft did a big consumer
| push for Windows 95 and there were lines to buy it and Bill
| Gates promoted it on the Jay Leno show.
|
| Windows 95 almost killed Apple.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| It was never really suited to retail sales channels like
| Radio Shack. It was more of a corporate thing although it
| obviously failed there as well.
|
| I only came across it at one site, a big UK bank (Midland
| Bank). They were using a heavily modified version, it
| didn't look anything like the original product.
| II2II wrote:
| There were plenty of people who wanted OS/2. They simply
| weren't the type of people who would go to Radio Shack.
|
| By plenty, I should be clear: it probably wasn't enough for
| OS/2 survive. IBM made some bad decisions early on.
| Microsoft was also a thorn in everyone's side and it looked
| like. While their product was good enough, their business
| practices were savage. Possibly something they learned from
| IBM's legacy.
|
| I was in my late teens/early twenties at the time. What I
| learned about how major corporations at the time is likely
| what led to my llife long interest in open source.
| zabzonk wrote:
| OS/2 had some of the ugliest icons I've ever seen (and that
| elephant!) - looking cute always wins.
| justin66 wrote:
| "Where's the buy button?"
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| When Blekko was acquired by IBM in 2015 we had an "Integration
| Executive" assigned to us who was responsible for all the 'detail
| work' of the integration (if you can imagine a project manager
| for an integration that would describe their job). He had joined
| IBM in the '80s. I found his perspective on the Gerstner years
| pretty fascinating.
|
| I had interned at IBM in the late 70's (as a high school kid of
| all things) and decided it was more of a real estate company than
| a computer company :-). Up until Gerstner, IBM had a policy of
| acquiring and holding real estate as a hedge. Often reported on
| the books under "cash equivalents" because real estate had the
| property that it could usually be liquidated when required into
| cash. When we were acquired in 2015 that had changed, nearly all
| of the places I had worked in the 70's were no longer owned (or
| operated) by IBM.
|
| Our exec said that those property holdings were the only thing
| that kept IBM alive between 1990 and 2000. They had to ruthlessly
| re-tool the entire business and that required a lot of up front
| cash without a product revenue stream to fund it. That was
| Gerstner's legacy for him, he used that asset to re-invent the
| company around consulting services, business automation,
| enterprise data processing, and business insights driven by
| processing billions of metrics.
|
| And it turned out that a lot of companies needed to understand
| their business better, and automate it, to adapt to this new
| fangled thing called the Internet.
|
| We both agreed that they would be unlikely to do that again as
| they had used up their 'secret weapon' already.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| It's interesting that Apple is buying real estate like there is
| no tomorrow.
| zabzonk wrote:
| > It's interesting that Apple is buying real estate like
| there is no tomorrow.
|
| Well, as the saying goes, they ain't making more of it.
| mehulashah wrote:
| I spent 9 months at IBM in 1999. At that time, Lou's legacy had
| already been solidified. He saved IBM. While not everyone agreed
| with his decisions, there was a culture of both honesty to
| customers and innovation that permeated the company. In contrast,
| look what happened to HP without such great leadership. Once a
| shining light in Silicon Valley, it turned into a shell of its
| former self.
| justin66 wrote:
| Maybe not a _great_ contrast there. HP and IBM entered the
| "shell of their former selves" stage of development at roughly
| the same time.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It can be argued that the real HP became Agilent and
| Keysight.
| KyleSanderson wrote:
| In his memoir, Gerstner described the turnaround as difficult and
| often wrenching for an IBM culture that had become insular and
| balkanized. After he arrived, over 100,000 employees were laid
| off from a company that had maintained a lifetime employment
| practice from its inception. Long allowed by their managers to
| believe that employment security had little reference to
| performance, thousands of IBM employees had grown lax, while the
| top-performing employees complained bitterly in attitude surveys.
| In the goal to create one common brand message for all IBM
| products and services around the world, under Gerstner's
| leadership the company consolidated its many advertising agencies
| down to just Ogilvy & Mather. Layoffs and other tough management
| measures continued in the first two years of his tenure, but the
| company was saved, and business success has continued to grow
| steadily since then.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| At Kaleida Labs (a joint venture of Apple and IBM), I gave Lou
| Gerstner a ScriptX demo involving an animated disembodied
| spinning bouncing eyeball.
|
| He commented "That's a bit too right-brained for me."
|
| I replied "Oh no, I should have used the other eyeball!"
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| I was in my 2nd year on college when I remember Gerstner was
| named to run IBM. At the time, IBM was the big tech monster that
| was stagnet and needed a fresh way to move forward. He came in
| and radically changed how it worked. I remember services became a
| big part of its core business. He really made a big difference on
| how the company functioned.
|
| What I admire is that one man changed IBM from the 50s and 60s
| stoggy IBM to a more modern functional company that was able to
| move forward. I supect that without him IBM would have died long
| time ago.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Gerstner
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20251228211136/https://gerstner....
|
| https://openlibrary.org/works/OL274413W/Who_says_elephants_c...
|
| https://archive.org/details/WhoSaysElephantsCantDance
| kev009 wrote:
| Seemed like a pivotal time in IBM's history. IBM in 1993 was
| looking face to face with irrelevance during his tenure after
| mainframes being evergreen declared relics, and losing the bus
| wars in the PC industry. IBM in 2002 was still an interesting R&D
| and products company. Unfortunately the talent bleed off has been
| continuous from that time and neither the R&D nor the products
| are as astonishing versus the competition as they used to be. At
| least no follow on CEO has been daft enough to undercut the
| mainframe business so far, but they did miss the timing and limp
| execution on plenty of things.. POWER8 was almost perfectly
| positioned to be the AI interconnect and glue of choice.
| theologic wrote:
| I arrived at IBM just a little before Gerstner got there. He was
| an absolutely amazing individual in terms of how he spoke
| incredibly bluntly to everyone. At IBM, it was all about legacy
| internal political structures, where you would have enormous
| presentations held by various executives trying to explain why
| their business was going to be best and why you needed to invest
| in it. The ritual of presenting at IBM's headquarters in Armonk
| was a symbol of the culture.
|
| While I don't remember every single speech word for word, I
| remember one of his earliest all-hands meetings. He said, "If I
| have one more exec come to me with a bunch of slides that can't
| simply describe what's happening in their business with the key
| strategic attributes, I'm going to start firing people." He
| continued, "If you're running a massive section of the business,
| I should be able to come to you and we should just be able to
| have a good, solid conversation about the levers. You need to
| demonstrate to me that you know exactly what's going on, and you
| can't have your staffer answer my questions."
|
| He also stated that he was completely appalled because, at every
| other company he had been at, they woke up every day paranoid
| about the competition. He told everyone we had completely lost
| our way. if you weren't waking up every single day thinking about
| the scorecard, you probably weren't right for the new
| environment.
|
| If you were internal and under any scrutiny at all during these
| years, you would understand that Lou, without Jerry York, was
| only half of the story. Jerry was an amazing financial mind who
| could sniff through spreadsheets and smell bullshit. People would
| come out of executive reviews hanging on for dear life. Some of
| these executives, after they had been exposed to York and
| actually performed well, would leave IBM and succeed elsewhere.
| However, to be clear, he was an A-hole.
|
| They achieved an enormous amount of cultural change, which was
| excellent. The problem was that while they had a great cultural
| leader and a great financial leader, IBM which was built to the
| brim with some of the most incredibly technical people you had
| ever seen, was completely lacking a clear technical lead.
| Inasmuch as these two guys created an amazing turnaround story,
| they never stopped for a moment to ask how to find the technical
| leadership to truly transform the place. While they did a great
| job, you cannot support a stool with only two legs. If IBM had
| found that third leg, we would still be counting it among the Mag
| 8 of today.
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