Top 100 Ibm's Quotes
#1. Last year she began distributing black plastic cards bearing the phrase "One Purpose: Be essential" to IBM's roughly 50,000 managers and has been known to demand to see them as she walks the halls.
Anonymous
#2. Describing one competitive advantage of IBM's Deep Blue chess computer. It has no fear.
Yasser Seirawan
#3. IBM's long-standing mantra is 'Think.' What has always made IBM a fascinating and compelling place for me, is the passion of the company, and its people, to apply technology and scientific thinking to major societal issues.
Ginni Rometty
#4. Compensation needs to be predominately performance-driven. If CEO compensation was performance-driven, which I believe it was in IBM's case, nobody would ever argue. If the shareholders didn't make billions and billions of dollars, I wouldn't make millions of dollars.
Louis V. Gerstner Jr.
#5. What I'm trying to do is deliver results, not promises; results, not vision; results, not concepts. The world is cynical about IBM's promises.
Louis V. Gerstner Jr.
#6. We can learn from IBM's successful history that you don't have to have the best product to become number one. You don't even have to have a good product.
Adam Osborne
#7. I've been a Fellow in a number of companies: Xerox, Apple, Disney, HP. There are certain similarities because all the Fellows programs were derived from IBM's, which itself was derived from the MIT 'Institute Professor' program.
Alan Kay
#8. Mandelbrot changed the way ibm's engineers thought about the cause of noise. bursts of errors had always sent the engineers looking for a man sticking a screwdriver somewhere.
James Gleick
#9. We depend on you to do the right thing; right for both you and the company. It is no exaggeration to say that IBM's reputation is in your hands.
Buck Rodgers
#11. Daniel Wolpert, of Cambridge University, is fond of pointing out that IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer is capable of beating a grand master at the game of chess, but no computer has yet been developed that can move a chess piece from one square to another as well as a 3-year-old child.
Stuart Firestein
#12. If CEO compensation was performance-driven, which I believe it was in IBM's case, nobody would ever argue. If the shareholders didn't make billions and billions of dollars, I wouldn't make millions of dollars. My salary was the same for 10 years. It was all performance-based.
Louis V. Gerstner Jr.
#13. Mark my words, there will be a day that will come when you will all see many, many documents that will directly contradict IBM's current public posturing.
Darl McBride
#14. You look at these past predictions like there's only a market in the world for five computers [as allegedly said by IBM founder Thomas Watson] and you realize it's not a good idea to predict too far into the future.
Geoffrey Hinton
#15. I realized much later in life that the reason this decision between MIT and IBM was so agonizing was because it wasn't really about choosing a career; it was about deciding who I was, which part of myself I wanted to be, and that's the hardest decision any of us has to make.
Mike Massimino
#16. Fear of foreign domination in India led the Janata Party, in the 1970s, to push for partial Indian ownership of all multinational firms within the country. The result was a spectacular pullback, by companies such as IBM and Coca-Cola, and a stagnant economy.
Peter Blair Henry
#17. Before I liked to write, I liked to type. I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter.
Gabrielle Zevin
#18. Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation. They prevent innovation from happening.
Steve Jobs
#19. I became a door-to-door IBM salesman in 1963, a job I had for six years. But most everyone thought it was a bad idea. Door-to-door salesmen were lower than used-car salesmen or attorneys.
James W. Murphy
#20. When you were a kid, [work in IBM] seemed like an awesome job. I'd get to go to work and have a briefcase. I loved how Dad wore a tie and got a car. I didn't know if all those things came together. I'd see my dad go off to work and we'd wait for him to come home, and we'd all be excited to see him.
Jimmy Fallon
#21. I had a working mother. She worked for IBM. My dad lived in another town - not very far away, but another town. So food was - I guess food was my friend.
John Schneider
#22. The focus on context is growing. Leading firms such as Coca-Cola, Amazon, GE, IBM, Google, Hertz, Proctor & Gamble, Standard & Poor's, and AT&T have begun to use context to shape their offers.
Robert Docters
#23. A lot of people saved IBM. Yes, I was the leader of that team, but I could never have done it without a group of IBMers helping me.
Louis V. Gerstner Jr.
#24. It's like when IBM drove a lot of innovation out of the computer industry before the microprocessor came along. Eventually, Microsoft will crumble because of complacency, and maybe some new things will grow. But until that happens, until there's some fundamental technology shift, it's just over.
Steve Jobs
#25. Watson, Sr., was running IBM, he decided they would never have more than four layers from the chairman of the board to the lowest level in the company. That may have been one of the greatest single reasons why IBM was successful.
Sam Walton
#26. I remember having computers at my parents' house growing up. We had different desktop PCs, but my first laptop was an IBM ThinkPad laptop. It was big, bulky, slow and terrible.
Scott Michael Foster
#27. There are plenty of things I wish I'd known when I decided to quit my position at IBM and work on the idea that later became TaskRabbit. Maybe that's why one of the things I cherish most about being a founder and CEO is the opportunity to offer advice to new entrepreneurs.
Leah Busque
#28. We flew down weekly to meet with IBM, but they thought the way to measure software was the amount of code we wrote, when really the better the software, the fewer lines of code.
Bill Gates
#29. It's not easy to remember, but IBM was the computer industry when I was growing up. You loved 'em. You hated 'em. You knew what they were doing. They had set a standard for mainframes. They also set a standard for great sales focus and heavy product R & D.
Bill Gates
#30. Twenty years ago rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for IBM.
George Will
#31. IBM was the original contractor for much of the computer interface design on the film.
Douglas Trumbull
#32. If being the biggest company was a guarantee of success, we'd all be using IBM computers and driving GM cars.
James Surowiecki
#33. IBM decided they were going to enter the copying business in 1968.
Arthur Rock
#34. The year before, 279,000 Apple IIs were sold, compared to 240,000 IBM PCs and its clones.
Walter Isaacson
#35. I've got a distribution system that goes to 170 countries. If I acquire properly, you know, you may be successful in one or two countries, or one place; I can scale, and that's part of the value that IBM brings.
Ginni Rometty
#36. In the early IBM team, that was a racially diverse team, a gender-diverse team.
Megan Smith
#37. Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.
Steve Jobs
#38. Jolt is for Windows programmers. It's typical IBM PC: it goes in brown and comes out yellow. Mountain Dew is for Macintosh programmers: it goes in yellow and comes out yellow. It's WYSIWYP.
Guy Kawasaki
#39. IBM customers of any size can now rest assured that Double-Take, the most innovative, flexible and reliable data protection solution on the market, is proven to integrate easily into their IBM infrastructure.
Dan Jones
#40. My cousin Elroy spent seven years as an IBM taper staring at THINK signs on the walls before he finally got a good idea: He quit.
Edward Abbey
#41. We think the managed security services opportunity is enormous and so we have been an active participant and probably the largest firm in this space outside of an IBM or EDS, which does large outsourcing contracts.
John W. Thompson
#42. IBM needed - an enormous sense of urgency.
Lou Gerstner
#43. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
Arthur Jensen
#44. Throughout his career, Jobs liked to see himself as an enlightened rebel pitted against evil empires, a Jedi warrior or Buddhist samurai fighting the forces of darkness. IBM was his perfect foil. He cleverly cast the upcoming battle not as a mere business competition,
Walter Isaacson
#45. I was going to visit IBM for six months as a visiting scientist. Now, six months is a lot of time, so I came with a whole list of projects that I might want to work on.
Wietse Venema
#46. Technology is something we buy to sell to the customers. Ericsson, Nokia and IBM do technology for a living, so let's give it to them because they know best. It has made the business model of Bharti very, very sustainable.
Sunil Mittal
#47. Many companies don't exist after 25 years. It's a rarity. Or if they do exist, they're like IBM, with a totally changing personality.
John Morgridge
#49. I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game; it is the game
Lou Gerstner
#50. At IBM, if we kept our same leadership for 36 years, we'd be bankrupt.
Scott Howell
#51. The fashionable term now is "Big Data." IBM estimates that we are generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, more than 90 percent of which was created in the last two years.36
Nate Silver
#52. Interestingly, differential cryptanalysis was first discovered in the research community in 1990. At this point, the IBM team declared that the attack was known to the designers at least 16 years earlier, and that DES was especially designed to withstand differential cryptanalysis. Finally,
Christof Paar
#53. (When the company was finally broken up in the 1980s to satisfy antitrust regulators, it was worth more than the combined worth of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola, and employed a million people.) Bell moved to Washington, D.C., became
Bill Bryson
#54. IBM actually followed the recommendations and built a workplace where people can work. (We predict this company will go far.)
Tom DeMarco
#55. That was an all-purpose IBM 3070. It took up half a room and still did not have enough capacity to do all the jobs demanded of it.
Frederik Pohl
#56. Even IBM can't stand in the way of progress ... for more than a decade.
Craig Bruce
#57. Since we built such sophisticated business machines, people tended to think of IBM as a model of order and logic - a totally streamlined organization in which we developed plans rationally and carried them out with utter precision. I never thought for a minute that was really the case.
Thomas J. Watson
#58. It's the first company to build the mental position that has the upper hand, not the first company to make the product. IBM didn't invent the computer; Sperry Rand did. But IBM was the first to build the computer position in the prospect's mind.
Al Ries
#59. I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very well with it.
Larry Wall
#60. You can't tell what's aboard a container ship. We carried every kind of cargo, all of it on view: a police car, penicillin, Johnnie Walker Red, toilets, handguns, lumber, Ping-Pong balls, and IBM data cards.
Christopher Buckley
#61. The typical project design time for a large company like IBM - and they keep track of this - is a little over four years.
Bill Gates
#62. The manuals we got from IBM would show examples of programs and I knew I could do a heck of a lot better than that. So I thought I might have some talent.
Donald Knuth
#63. RPX's current members include such giants as Apple, Amazon, Cisco, Dell, eBay, Google, Hewlett-Packard, HTC, IBM, Intel, LG, Microsoft, Oracle, Samsung, Sony, T-Mobile, and Verizon.
Anonymous
#64. Both VisiCalc and MultiPlan were available when the IBM PC shipped in October 1981. 1-2-3 didn't hit the market until January 1983.
Mitch Kapor
#65. A while back, I came across a line attributed to IBM founder Thomas Watson. If you want to achieve excellence, he said, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.
Tom Peters
#66. My dad used to work at IBM, so we used to get discounts on computers and stuff, and I did have a ThinkPad.
Jimmy Fallon
#67. It was an impressive achievement, of course, and a human achievement by the members of the IBM team, but Deep Blue was only intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better.
Garry Kasparov
#68. I remember my father banging away on an IBM Selectric in the garage. He wrote his first novels on that machine. I remember its pebbly surface, its cold heft. It made its mark, literally and violently.
Jesse Kellerman
#69. If joining IBM was commitment, not employment, and the company engaged in something more than business, it had a right to demand of its men unconditional loyalty, Watson believed.
Thomas Watson
#70. IBM has taken a leadership role in this area and is prepared to be a technology partner with companies around the world to take advantage of these new developments.
John Patrick
#71. We know unequivocally that the traditional MBA curriculum for running large companies like IBM, GM and Boeing does not work in startups. In fact, it's toxic.
Steven Gary Blank
#72. The normal expectancy of the average investor - for example, the pension funds of AT&T or IBM - is 6% for a long time.
Charlie Munger
#73. I have always thought of myself as an inventor first and foremost. An engineer. An entrepreneur. In that order. I never thought of myself as an employee. But my first jobs as an adult were as an employee: at IBM, and then at my first start-up.
Aaron Patzer
#74. If Microsoft is the new IBM, Google is the new Microsoft - the defining company of the industry.
Mitchell Kapor
#75. It was not until the appearance of cyberpunk in the 1980s that SF began to grapple in a broadly meaningful way with the reality of computers as something other than giant mainframes tended by crewcut IBM nerds.
Paul Di Filippo
#76. Overall, OS/2's problems fall into two categories: IBM and Microsoft.
Jean-Louis Gassee
#77. IBM has taken our valuable trade secrets and given them away to Linux.
Darl McBride
#78. If Jobs and Wozniak had believed that IBM was the be-all and end-all, there would have been no personal computers.
Jimmy Maher
#79. How youMore people will learn about IBM from Wikipedia in the coming years than from IBM itself.
Thomas L. Friedman
#80. Within IBM at that time, growing a beard without getting fired was an indisputable mark of technical genius. In
Gerald M. Weinberg
#81. This kind of intense loyalty, then, became the well-spring of the IBM spirit, the family spirit as it was called.
Thomas Watson
#82. My father worked for IBM. My mother raised us kids. There were six of us, and a couple of extra foster kids at any given time.
Steve Coogan
#83. Even thirty years later, reflecting back on the competition, Jobs cast it as a holy crusade: "IBM was essentially Microsoft at its worst. They were not a force for innovation; they were a force for evil. They were like ATT or Microsoft or Google is." Unfortunately
Walter Isaacson
#84. Every time we've moved ahead in IBM, it was because someone was willing to take a chance, put his head on the block, and try something new.
Thomas J. Watson
#85. I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
Joan Didion
#86. At that time in IBM you had to wear a white shirt, dark pants and a black tie with your badge stapled to your shoulder or something," said Steve Bristow, an engineer. "At Atari the work people did counted more than how they looked.
Walter Isaacson
#87. IBM isn't investing billions of dollars every year into research and development - and winning more patents than our top 10 competitors combined for more than a decade - as an academic exercise. But research is now being driven much more by what people need rather than just by what is possible.
Samuel J. Palmisano
#88. And the reason I came to IBM was I think - I always say at a really early age, I learned you've got to be passionate about what you do. No matter what it is, you put too much, your heart and soul in it, you have to be passionate about it. You make too many sacrifices.
Ginni Rometty
#89. When a manufacturing company in Spain looks to IBM for a solution to a problem, they expect us to bring the best of IBM worldwide to it, not just the experience of IBM Spain.
Louis V. Gerstner Jr.
#90. Why IBM? We have tremendous expertise. One of the reasons we can drive phenomenal efficiency around the world is because we've made IBM an e-business.
Samuel J. Palmisano
#91. I grew up in Dallas, and my dad works for IBM, so I grew up in the environment of Silicon Prairie.
Scott Michael Foster
#92. People who feared IBM were wrong, ... Technology is ever-changing.
Bill Gates
#93. You cannot have companies where many of the largest ones lose money indefinitely without someone finally waving the white flag, and IBM is the most recent example of that.
Kevin Rollins
#94. IBM is helping to greatly advance and expedite quality sampling while providing our project investigators peace of mind that the information they are gathering is securely stored and protected.
H.G.Wells
#95. My dream was to grow up and get a job at IBM, like my dad. That seemed like a logical dream.
Jimmy Fallon
#96. Just think, IBM and DEC in the same room, and we did it.
Ken Thompson
#97. The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC.
Bill Gates
#98. IBM doesn't want its people to get frustrated and restless because it has them reaching for carrots they can't quit
Buck Rodgers
#99. I think everybody at IBM knows the early 1990s disaster, and it's in our fabric that you cannot miss the ship.
Samuel J. Palmisano
#100. If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years.
Steve Jobs
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