Hesh Wiener
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Mad Dog 21/21: Toasting Savonarola
January 18, 2016 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreFrom the 13th into the 18th century, except for an interlude beginning in 1494, the Medici family dominated Florence and surrounding Tuscany. That exceptional 18-year interval began as Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican monk, spearheaded a dramatic reform movement. The epitome of Savonarola’s campaign was the spectacular burning of valuables deemed tokens of sinful self-indulgence: bonfires of the vanities.
Savonarola irritated many powerful people, including the Pope. Ultimately, he was tortured, convicted of heresy, publicly hanged and burned. Since then, inspired reformers in politics and commerce have often chosen to tread lightly, even at decorous
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Mad Dog 21/21: Time, Like Gas, Passes; Love, Like Stardom, Fades
November 16, 2015 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreIBM’s Watson said the main themes of Bob Dylan‘s song lyrics were that time passes and love fades. Dylan said this sounded about right. Both were kidding: The obvious point of the television commercial featuring this insipid exchange between machine and man was that there are no fools like old fools.
Mr. Dylan, for non-AARP folk, was a pop music icon decades ago, when IBM was the emperor of computing; today, Dylan, a wrinkled old fart, is at best the second most important living entertainer from Minnesota, long since eclipsed by the timely and relevant Garrison Keillor.
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Mad Dog 21/21: Torque Is Cheap
October 26, 2015 Hesh Wiener
… Read more“Screw it,” said Archimedes of Syracuse, refusing to surrender to the gravity of the situation. Around 250 B.C., he developed a water pump that converted torque to lift. It was a helix inside a cylinder, a progenitor of propellers and augers. Archimedes also devised ingenious ways to calculate volume and mass. Archimedes’ two principal pursuits, applied physics and applied math, are as important today as ever, particularly for IBM’s current passion, the Internet of Things.
But IBM’s IoT prowess, like Archimedes’ “eureka,” may be apocryphal; it remains, at best, unproven.
The “eureka” story has been around a long
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Mad Dog 21/21: Land, Hope, And Glory
September 21, 2015 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreThe remarkable Edwin Land was a persnickety inventor who wove science and art, a college dropout who never stopped learning and teaching. Land and his Polaroid Corporation built a tower of brilliant things; the SX-70 camera stood at its pinnacle. His life and work inspired Steve Jobs, mastermind of the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iTunes app store, and the magnificent, inimitable Apple Inc. After Land left Polaroid, it withered into a husk. Since Steve Jobs died, Apple, IBM’s only hope, has struggled. If Apple eventually collapses as Polaroid did, its demise will accelerate the ruin of IBM.
Jobs’
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Mad Dog 21/21: Putting Money Where Its Malthus
August 31, 2015 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreIn 1798 Robert Malthus triggered a perpetual debate about the damaging effects of demographic pressure. An Essay on the Principle of Population asserted that, unchecked by canon, custom or calamity, a nation’s fecundity will outpace its ability to produce or procure food. A similar phenomenon can weaken a company. IBM’s revenue per employee has fallen since 2004, two years into Sam Palmisano decade-long reign. IBM’s subsequent leader, Ginny Rometty, hasn’t been able to reverse this dire trend; consequently, IBM’s corporate culture is losing vitality as its employees become financially undernourished.
For IBM, as for other cultural aggregates since biblical
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Mad Dog 21/21: If It Ducks Like A Quack, Part 2
July 27, 2015 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreA century ago, Thomas J. Watson’s IBM prohibited employees from drinking alcohol, even in off hours. Yet IBM was hardly alone in its penchant for probity. In 1920, America amended its Constitution to usher in Prohibition. But there was an unintended consequence: organized crime, fueled by the booze biz, metathesized. Times have changed dramatically, and now it is easier to buy dope in Denver than insulin in Ithaca. And IBM, yclept Dr. Watson, an Aesculapian bean-counter enlightened by AI, is injecting itself into medicine. As the temperance folk asked after banishing demon rum, “What could go wrong?”
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Mad Dog 21/21: If It Ducks Like A Quack
June 22, 2015 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreYale has many impressive graduates, including Eli Whitney, who declared, “Keep your cotton-pickin’ hands off my gin.” The university has also wrapped sheepskin around less admirable characters, including a father and son who conned first America and then Britain into trusting their wrongheaded but likely heartfelt beliefs. We are, of course, referring to Elisha and Benjamin Perkins, doctors who promoted quack medical apparatus. Their saga shows what a minefield medicine can be, even for a great institution like Yale. And then there’s the colchicine story. Dr. Watson of IBM, mind the gaps!
The former fame and subsequent
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Mad Dog 21/21: Big Apple
June 17, 2015 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreIBM was once America’s most valuable company; today Apple enjoys that distinction. Apple’s liquid assets alone significantly exceed the total market value of IBM’s shares. Apple could acquire Big Blue for cash and still have tens of millions left over. Hoping that the knack for making money will rub off, IBM has cozied up to Apple.
But saving IBM will take more than a bunch of iPad apps and some press conferences. IBM isn’t going to escape the consequences of its stupidity by shilling for Apple’s most problematic product, the iPad, in Apple’s worst market, Japan.
In Apple’s most recent
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Mad Dog 21/21: Not As Big Blue
May 18, 2015 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreIn 2011, IBM‘s revenue exceeded $106 billion. Every year since, the company’s intake has fallen, sliding 10 percent to under $95 billion by 2014. Analysts at investment bank Credit Suisse predict IBM’s 2015 revenue will drop another 9 percent to $86 billion. The CS analysts believe IBM’s revenue will dwindle to $81.6 billion by 2018. Despite this, most investors are hanging tough. The same cannot be said of IBM’s customers, who are impressed by superior systems engineering not clever financial engineering; they understandably see IBM’s failures in the server business as a danger.
In 2014, according to IDC,
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Mad Dog 21/21: The Innovators’ Droll Lemma
March 23, 2015 Hesh Wiener
… Read moreRobert Samuelson got it right, and memorably so. Last June, the Washington Post columnist characterized a spat in print between two Harvard professors as “an intellectual food fight.” The fight is over the value of business professor Clayton Christensen‘s theory of disruptive innovation, and Christensen’s adversary is history and literature professor Jill Lepore. Christensen’s theory, right, wrong, or some of each, may help explain IBM’s perplexing situation, and arguments about it are undoubtedly underway at the top of IBM. And if they aren’t they ought to be.
In Christensen’s 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, he asserts