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Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM Paperback – September 20, 1994

4.1 out of 5 stars 28

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Provides the inside story of the rise and fall of IBM, offering a devastating study of corporate bureaucracy, lack of foresight, and decline. Reprint. 75,000 first printing. Tour.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Richly detailed...fascinating reading."

Chicago Tribune

"Big Blues has many of the same qualities as other memorable journalistic feats of recent years, The Right Stuff, for instance, or All the President's Men. That is, it has tension, simplicity, and significance."

New York Newsday

"Recommended to executives of all multinationals, not just American ones, as a cautionary tale about corporate hubris."

The Economist

"Riveting."

Fortune

"A savvy newsman's tellingly detailed report on the ruinous decline of IBM."

Kirkus Reviews

From the Back Cover

"Richly detailed...fascinating reading."

Chicago Tribune

"Big Blues has many of the same qualities as other memorable journalistic feats of recent years, The Right Stuff, for instance, or All the President's Men. That is, it has tension, simplicity, and significance."

New York Newsday

"Recommended to executives of all multinationals, not just American ones, as a cautionary tale about corporate hubris."

The Economist

"Riveting."

Fortune

"A savvy newsman's tellingly detailed report on the ruinous decline of IBM."

Kirkus Reviews

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0517882213
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Three Rivers Press (September 20, 1994)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 377 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780517882214
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0517882214
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 out of 5 stars 28

About the author

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Paul Carroll
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Paul Carroll has excelled at the highest levels of journalism for decades, while pushing the state of the art on business strategy and innovation.

For 17 years, he was a reporter and editor at the Wall Street Journal, where he wrote about information technology. The WSJ nominated him twice for the Pulitzer Prize, and he was a finalist once. He left to become a partner at Diamond Management & Technology Consultants, where he founded and edited a magazine that was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. For the past eight years, Paul has been the editor-in-chief at Insurance Thought Leadership, an affiliate of The Institutes that drives innovation in insurance.

He is the best-selling author of numerous books, beginning with "Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM," published by Crown in 1993. In 2008, Paul and Chunka Mui published "Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn From the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years," based on 20 researchers’ two years of analysis of 2,500 corporate disasters. While Jim Collins looked at success stories and said, Here’s how to be like those guys, "Billion Dollar Lessons" looked at failures and said, Here’s how not to be like those guys. The Wall Street Journal review called the book “fascinating…, insightful and crisply written.” Most recently, Paul, Chunka, and Tim Andrews have published "A Brief History of a Perfect Future: Inventing the World We Can Proudly Leave Our Kids by 2050."

Paul was the writer on the National Broadband Plan, which the FCC submitted to Congress in 2010, and on a report that the Department of Energy produced later that year on a $36.5 billion innovation initiative funded by the Stimulus Act.

He and Chunka have founded a boutique consulting firm, the Future Histories Group, which stress tests corporate strategies. They have worked with senior management at numerous major organizations.

Paul graduated magna cum laude from Michigan State University’s Honors College at age 19 and earned a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University the following year.

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
28 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2018
Entertaining look at early personal computer days. Also recommend "Jobs Vs. Gates" video.
Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2011
For anyone interested in IBM's recent history, this is an excellent account. It shows how IBM failed to adapt to the effects of new technology in the 1980's. At the end of this period, Lou Gerstner took over as CEO. If you also read Lou Gerstner's book "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance," you can get some idea how in this archetypal U.S. company, workers were shoved aside for the sake of success after the failure that came to a head in 1993. Lou was ruthless and greedy, but his formula for centralization saved the company for the time being. In the process, workers were exploited to some extent and security disappeared from their lives. I wonder how long this solution will continue to work. I think that an organization that disregards its workers' needs is vulnerable. At least two possibilities exist: the company weakens because of lack of support from its employees or employees get more power by force. The conflict between haves and have-nots damages the business. Dictatorships are unstable.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2016
Older narrative but interesting for those of us that experienced this period of IBM's history. Easy to read.
Reviewed in the United States on August 23, 2023
An interesting page turner of a book on the origins, the rise, the peak, and the decline of IBM not due to Microsoft but because of the culture of arrogance, complacency, internal rot, lack of vision, the same type of executive and managerial corruption, bureaucracy and incompetence that destroyed the Soviet Union. IBM got stuck in the past and despite 1001 chances to amend their ways and streamline their culture and processes, they rejected every opportunity to do so , going as far as neglecting to patent a method for focusing light very narrowly in order to apply it for the manufacture of microchips. The Japanese ended up patenting the idea anyway, and IBM had to license it from them. Stupidity and incompetence led to losses of existing markets and future technologies. In the end the company malfunctioned so bad internally that they abused loyal employees causing a lady to try to commit suicide. I had a hard time reading that chapter towards the end. IBM has become a worthless shell of what it once was. Like Xerox, they could have owned workstations and personal computers, like Kodak, who invented digital cameras, could have owned the entire industry, and IBM could have dominated computers and operating systems of not for their shortsightedness, inflexible culture, arrogance and bullying of smaller companies such as Microsoft. Frankly by the end of the book you’ll wonder how the company hasn’t collapsed and burned itself out of existence and they deserved to. Unfortunately it’s one of those to bid to fail firms that would be bailed out by the taxpayer in such a position. Worth a read.
Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2021
I was there and some of this is true, and some fiction. In the book Lou Gerstner saves the company, in fact he set up a business culture that resulted in a continuous decline in profit and resulted in negative revenue growth. Carroll cherry picks stories and only presents the drama. He drives facts to extinction by mixing them with fiction.
Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2013
This was a gift for my neice's husband. As far as I know he likes it very much and is reading it right now.
Reviewed in the United States on October 16, 2009
This book was published in 1994, but don't hold that against it. It covers a period of IBM history from 1980 to late 1993- from the beginnings of the IBM PC to the end of the John Akers era, when Lou Gerstner became CEO. Gerstner steered the company away from its failing attempts to once again dominate the PC industry, towards services and consulting, and is generally credited with saving IBM from the hole it had dug itself into by the early '90s. If someone were to write this book today, it would likely still wrap things up in 1993.

It starts out with with the story of how the IBM PC came to be, as well as a quick and interesting refresher on IBM itself, from the late 1800s up to 1980. Most people know the general outline of what happened next: the deal with Microsoft for an OS, the phenomenal success of the PC and the XT, the failure of the PC Jr., the rise of the clones, and finally IBM's attempts to reassert itself with OS/2 and MCA (Microchannel Architecture, an ill-fated replacement for the ISA expansion bus used by PCs of the day). This book goes into great detail on all of these topics, from executive decisions down to the engineering teams who were charged with implementing them. I don't know of any other book that gets into this level of detail on this material. It wraps up with the genesis of the PowerPC (a joint venture with Apple and Motorola) and Akers' retirement.

Most computer history books tell this story in a very glossed-over form: IBM was just too big and stupid and arrogant, and scrappy underdogs like Microsoft and Compaq turned the tables on them. This book gets into the nuts and bolts of how and why IBM was unable to keep pace with the PC industry. There were technical reasons, due to the burdensome engineering processes that their PC division inherited from their mainframe division. There were organizational reasons, due more to the democratic nature of IBM than any arrogance or stupidity. Finally, there were just some fundamental misunderstandings at the executive level about what drove the industry.

So, highly recommended if this is something you're interested in learning more about. I'm giving it 4 rather than 5 stars because it can be a little meandering at times. It feels more like a collection of essays than a single tight narrative, and there's some overlap between chapters and jumping around in time. However, it's compelling read if you're as interested in the history of the industry as I am.
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Top reviews from other countries

A. I. Mackenzie
4.0 out of 5 stars Good solid book on the fall of IBM up until 1993
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 9, 2015
Good solid book on the fall of IBM up until 1993.
This goes into a fair amount of detail about executives decisions and personalities at IBM, but fundamentally it demonstrates that culture eats strategy.
IBM was used to a pace and a mark up appropriate to mainframes and mini computers, which up until the late 70s were the only significant computer market. IBM was always a sales driven company - salesman occupied all the top management jobs.
PCs upset all this, IBM got the original PC right mainly be ignoring IBM process and going outside the company for the bulk of the hardware and software but after the launch, the PC market grew to be so big that IBM wanted to make it strategic and to fit within the constraints of the mainframe / mini computer market. This turned out to be disastrous, IBM's hardware and software were rarely competitive and they kept trying to throttle the pace of the PC market - but the PC market was driven by Moore's law and with performance doubling every 18 months or so the usual tricks IBM used didn't work - they couldn't cripple products and then discover improvements magically 18 months later (in the mainframes a common trick was to over install hardware and cripple the extras with some code, then send and engineer to delete the code, AKA the golden screwdriver). There was also a terrible financial mistake which allowed customers to buy their mainframes, this lead to a sudden dumping of cash in the 80s but meant revenue dried up in the 90s.
So an old story, funnily enough the same things seem to be happening to Microsoft now.
Lots of detail about executives, but until Lou Gerstner took over no real change took place and MS and the cloning manufacturers ran rings round IBM. The conversion to services in the 90s, now isn't looking so clever, either.
Other good book are 
Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition and Still Can't Get a Date  and  In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters . Both a little lighter than this book.
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