"A detailed and devastating portrait of life inside the International
Business Machines Corporation ... Mr. Carroll creates a you-are-there feel
that will seem fresh even to veteran I.B.M. watchers."
--The New York Times Book Review

                    BIG BLUES: THE UNMAKING OF IBM

"The demise of IBM is a distinctly American Tragedy," says Paul Carroll,
author of BIG BLUES: THE UNMAKING OF IBM (Crown Publishers, Inc.,
September 15, 1993).  "Founded on one man's vision, it grew to the point
that it employed more people than the next five biggest computer companies
combined, but IBM was blinded by arrogance and stopped competing.  The
coming months are critical to determining its survival."  Once a paragon
of success, professionalism, and market domination, IBM has, in the past
few years, taken writeoffs close to $30 billion, wiping out nearly half
the profits IBM has earned in its eighty-year history.  BIG BLUES is an
inside look at what brought the most successful corporation in American
history to its knees, shedding light on the problems that recently forced
IBM to cut tens of thousands of additional jobs and report one of the
largest losses any company has ever seen.

Carroll, A Wall Street Journal reporter, covered IBM for seven years,
allowing him extraordinary access to its executives.  In BIG BLUES,
Carroll not only details where IBM went wrong, but also reports boardroom
revelations, provides personal anecdotes about the major players involved,
and, through extensive interviews, brings into the story many of the other
key figures in the computer and software industries.  "I thought it was
important to capture the psychology of IBM, as well as evaluating its
business decisions," says Carroll. "Many of IBM's actions seem senseless
if you don't understand the feeling of infallibility and entitlement that
permeated its hallways."

When Tom Watson, Sr., took command in 1914, IBM quickly became the
unparalleled leader in tabulating machines, then dominated the mainframe
computer industry as it began to develop in the 1950s and 1960s.  It was
the PC explosion--which, ironically, IBM itself helped to start--that, in
the 1980s, would herald the beginnings of trouble at IBM.  "The PC changed
the computer market in fundamental ways, and IBM couldn't come to grips
with that," says Carroll.  "IBM had plenty of opportunities in the PC
business, but it would have needed to change to seize them, and it
couldn't.  It was the most profitable, the most admired, the best company
in the world at that time--so the concept of change was beyond them." 
IBM's incredibly formal organizational structure, its reliance on jazzy
presentations at the expense of action, and its endless task forces and
meetings, made it a lumbering beast trying to play catch-up with
responsive renegades like Apple and Microsoft.

BIG BLUES describes the inner workings of IBM, including its dreaded
Management Committee, the company's luxurious version of the Supreme
Court; its paranoid security measures, including security escorts on plane
rides, there to verify that no prying eyes looked at company papers; and
its stormy relationship with Bill Gates and Microsoft, where Big Blue
culture clashed with a young company's informality--and lost.  One
misjudgment alone cost IBM billions of dollars, as IBM haughtily declined
when, in 1986, Microsoft asked them to buy 10% of Microsoft's stock for a
pittance--a mistake reported for the first time in BIG BLUES.  There were
many more misjudgments where Microsoft was concerned.

             * NOW AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE! *

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