Carroll, Paul. Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM. New York: Crown Publishers,
1994. 375 pages.
Paul Carroll covered IBM for the Wall Street Journal for seven years
prior to this book. Even though IBM did not cooperate with this book,
Carroll enjoyed extraordinary access to IBM executives during those years.
This is a rather impressive chronicle of a company that got too big, too
top-heavy, too self-confident, and too isolated from the outside world.
The mistakes that IBM made with the personal computer, and with their
dealings with Microsoft, are covered thoroughly here. Carroll depicts an
overweight and arrogant IBM constantly creating headaches for Microsoft.
One suspects that IBM deserved to get the shaft, even if Microsoft didn't
deserve the windfall from IBM in the first place. Microsoft gave IBM many
more opportunities to do the right and reasonable thing than IBM deserved,
and it never even occurred to IBM to treat them with respect.
Some of the details of IBM high-flying are amazing -- for example,
spending millions of dollars on foreign junkets for board members and their
families. In another case, Jim Cannavino, the head of IBM's PC section, met
with Gates in Las Vegas in 1989 to talk about OS/2. Cannavino had a mobile
office with a "big desk, plush carpeting, a bathroom, several phone lines,
and room for several assistants." He had also "outfitted eight lavish
trailers and had them driven cross-country to Las Vegas from New York."
ISBN 0-517-59197-9
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