Spectrum Modern History Pdf Google Drive
Arleen Smelko
Ultimately, IBM was big and diverse enough in talent, staffing, financing, and materiel to succeed. In an almost entrepreneurial fashion, it took advantage of emerging technologies, no matter where they were located within the enterprise. In hindsight, it seemed a sloppy and ill-advised endeavor, chaotic in execution and yet brilliantly successful. We live in an age that celebrates innovation, so examining cases of how innovation is done can only illuminate our understanding of the process.
By the end of the 1950s, computer users faced a seemingly intractable problem. Had it not been solved, it would have prevented computers from becoming widespread, and any thoughts of living in an Information Age would have been fiction.
Organizations were acquiring computers in great numbers, automating many of the old punch card operations and doing more with data processing. The popularity of the IBM 1401 illustrates the rapid adoption of computing. Over 12,000 of these systems were sold from their introduction in 1959 to 1971, when IBM retired the line.
Learson also assigned John W. Haanstra, president of the General Products Division, which produced the 1400s, to chair an internal task force called SPREAD (for Systems Programming, Research, Engineering, and Development), with Evans as vice chair. Brooks later joined the task force. In December 1961, the group presented its technical recommendations.
Their report called for five compatible computers, labeled processors (defined as the computer, its memory, and channels to connect to peripheral equipment). The software and peripherals for one processor were to work with all other processors. The plan called for using standard hardware and software interfaces between computers and peripherals, such as between disk drives and tape drives connecting to computers, so that the peripherals did not have to be swapped out when a new processor was installed. The recommendations became the basis for the System/360.
A second set of problems involved manufacturing the electronic components for the new systems. The electronics industry was starting to work on integrated circuits, and the new computers were going to be filled with these new components. To be independent, IBM had to make its own. It proved to be an expensive proposition.
Eventually, the corporate management committee, including Watson and the board of directors, sucked in a deep breath and approved the SPREAD recommendations. IBM was off to the races in the wildest ride of its history.
IBM could not hide what was going on. New employees flocked to Endicott, Poughkeepsie, and other labs and plants. Customers heard rumors, the computer press was speculating, and executives at GE, Honeywell, Sperry Univac, and elsewhere were trying to anticipate what IBM would do.
At IBM, nobody seemed satisfied with progress on the new system. Engineering, manufacturing, sales, and corporate staff were in many cases working 100-hour weeks. Engineers moved cots into their offices. When Watson stopped in to see how programming was going, an engineer yelled at him to get out so he could work. The chairman of IBM beat a hasty retreat.
On that day, IBM introduced a mind-boggling 150 new products: 6 computers; 44 peripherals, including tape drives, disk drives, printers, and control units; and a promise to provide the software necessary to make everything work together. The press packet was an inch thick, and manuals describing all the machines, components, software, and their installation and operation filled more than 50 linear feet.
The central feature of the System/360 was, of course, its compatibility. A growing data center could install a small 360 computer and later upgrade to a larger one without rewriting software or replacing peripheral equipment. Once familiar with the system, one did not have to learn a great deal more to handle an upgrade. The name 360 was chosen to suggest the idea of 360 degrees, covering everything.
In the first month following the S/360 announcement, customers worldwide ordered over 100,000 systems. To put that number in perspective, in that same year in the United Kingdom, all of Western Europe, the United States, and Japan, there were slightly more than 20,000 computers of any kind installed. The first deliveries of the smaller machines were promised for the third quarter of 1965, and deliveries of the larger ones in the first quarter of 1966. The delay between announcement and shipping date gave customers time to decide which models to acquire, get them approved and budgeted, plan on where to house them, train staff, complete software remediation, and so forth. With the April announcement, IBM bought itself two years to make good on its promises and knock competitors back on their heels.
From 7 April to when the company started delivering machines to customers, IBM entered the most dangerous, intense, and challenging era of its history. The company spent US $5 billion (about $40 billion today) to develop the System/360, which at the time was more than IBM made in a year, and it would eventually hire more than 70,000 new workers. Every IBMer believed that failure meant the death of IBM.
As the number of orders for the S/360 kept increasing, manufacturing was asked in 1965 to double production. One production manager said it could not be done and was replaced. Quality declined. Some of the electronic circuits within an SLT, for example, were not complete, so electrons could not go where they were supposed to. By the end of the year, the quality control department had impounded 25 percent of all SLT modules, bringing production to a halt.
After the problems were solved, manufacturing proceeded in 1966, resulting in 90 million SLT modules bring produced, compared to just 36 million the previous year. IBM opened a new plant in East Fishkill, just south of Poughkeepsie, which made more semiconductor devices than all other manufacturers worldwide combined. Production also expanded to new facilities in Burlington, Vt., and in Corbeil-Essonnes, France.
To resolve manufacturing problems with the ferrite-core memories, IBM set up a plant in Boulder, Colo., in 1965. But it took the craftsmanship of workers in Japan to get the production of memories up to the required amounts and quality.
Fred Brooks volunteered to help, and IBM added 1,000 people to the operating system project, costing the company more for software in one year than had been planned for the entire development of the S/360 system. But throwing more programmers at the project did not help. Based on the S/360 experience, Brooks would later expand on that theme in The Mythical Man-Month (Addison-Wesley, 1975), still one of the most widely read books on computing. The software would take years to complete, but in the end it worked well enough to keep the shipping delay to one month.
Because the S/360 was the heart of much computing by the end of the 1960s, its users constituted a world of their own. Thousands of programmers only knew how to use software that ran on S/360s. Additional thousands of data-processing personnel had worked only with IBM equipment, including keypunch machines, printers, tape drives, disk drives, and software, which in many instances took years to master. By the early 1970s the computing space was largely an IBM world on both sides of the Atlantic, in the emerging markets in Latin America, and in Japan.
The generation that brought out the S/360 remained unique in the company, a special clan bonded ferociously to IBM. Careers had been made and broken, personal lives and marriages upended. IBMers did not know at the time how extensively their products would change the world, but we do.
Highly personalized customer experiences, when offered to millions of individual customers by using proprietary data, are difficult for competitors to imitate. When executed well, such experiences enable businesses not only to differentiate themselves but also to gain a sustainable competitive advantage. Moreover, our research has shown that personalized experiences drive up both customer loyalty and the top line.
To maximize the results of a personalization program, we recommend focusing initially on the most loyal customers, as programs targeting regular shoppers yield a return on investment three times higher than that of mass promotions. Moreover, building data on the most loyal customers sets off a virtuous cycle by generating ever-more-relevant data and higher response rates that further boost data quality.
Not to be outdone in the personalization game is Nike, one of the largest athletic-footwear and athleisure companies in the world. Nike has taken personalization all the way to the individual product by allowing customers to configure their own clothes and shoes. The company recently launched a 3-D sneaker-customization platform that allows shoppers to generate real-time, shareable snapshots of finished footwear.
Given the success stories, it is little surprise that, in a Periscope by McKinsey survey of retailers attending World Retail Congress 2017, 95 percent of retail CEOs say personalizing the customer experience is a strategic priority for their companies. But that same survey showed that only 23 percent of consumers believe that retailers are doing a good job in their personalization efforts. What is behind this disparity?
First of all, most retailers are still in the early stages of their personalization efforts. Our research indicates that only 15 percent of retailers have fully implemented personalization strategies. More than 80 percent are still defining a personalization strategy or have begun pilot initiatives. The remaining retailers have decided to deprioritize personalization for now, for various reasons.
All is not lost, however. As our previous case examples show, retailers across the spectrum have managed to create truly personalized experiences for both the online world and brick-and-mortar channels. The results for both the affected customers and the financial results are impressive. So how do these retailers do this?
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