Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Baseball and The Broken Heart

I think that many of us first learn about broken hearts through baseball.

One of the earliest memories of my childhood was when my team, Almendares lost a game to their fierce rivals, Habana, in the Cuban baseball winter league.  I was about 3 at the time, and still remember being very sad and crying.    

A friend and colleague from Germany, who knows little about baseball, told me that when he was on assignment in the US a while back, he once saw his then young children crying in front of the TV and asked them what was the matter.  The Yankees lost, they said.  My friend was baffled.

Collaborative Processing: The Internet Effect

What is collaborative processing?  Since the 1970s, transaction processing has been one of the major paradigms of computing.  The quintessential example of transaction processing is when you get money from an ATM.  Transaction processing typically involves one person at a terminal or PC interacting with an application and data base.  Transaction processing received a huge boost with the advent of the Internet and e-business in the mid 90s, because as transaction applications and data bases were web-enabled, you could now do the transactions from your browser anywhere, anytime (except of course to get the physical cash you still need the ATM).  e-business gave transactions universal access and reach, but otherwise the basic paradigm of computing remained the same.

Looking Out for Asteroids

In  October of 2000, I gave a speech at an IBM customer event that took place in a very memorable location, Radio City Music Hall in New York.  The thought that I was speaking from the same stage where so many great artists have performed over the years, and given acceptance speeches for  Tony's, Grammy's, MTV Music and other awards was pretty cool, although, as I told the audience at the beginning of my speech, in my fantasies I was invited to the stage by Carlos Santana or Jennifer Lopez, not by my friend and colleague Bill Zeitler.

My speech focused on the major changes going on in information technologies, and I said that the IT marketplace is being pounded by what seems like a succession of major asteroids. After each of these asteroids hit, companies that do not adapt to the major changes taking place will be left behind, and their place will be taken by new companies born from the new competitive landscape.

Where was I when I first discovered that "the world is flat?"

Throughout his book, "The World is Flat," Tom Friedman asks people he meets around the world where they were when they first discovered that the world was flat; that is, when they realized that something profound was under way that promised to change all aspects of business, society and their personal lives.  The "something profound" Tom Friedman writes about is the "flattening of the world" i.e., the linking together of people, processes and information everywhere, made possible by advances in technology, standards and market conditions, that is creating a worldwide collaborative platform for innovation in the 21st century. 

As I read the book, I kept wondering how I would answer that question.  I had had quite a number of such "flat world" moments of recognition in the early days of our Internet Division.  In February of 1996, for example, we decided to set up a Web site so people could follow the first chess match between Deep Blue, our chess playing supercomputer, and then world chess champion Garry Kasparov.  The Internet and  World Wide Web were just beginning to take off out there, and we honestly thought that very few people would be accessing an obscure Web site featuring a chess match, so we hosted it on a small Unix server under the desk of Dave Grossman, one of the pioneers and heroes of IBM's Internet efforts.

Services Sciences, Management and Engineering

In his best seller "The World is Flat," Thomas Friedman writes (p. 46) about the "flattening of the world" as one of those disruptive, dislocating technological revolutions, like Gutenberg's printing press and the Industrial Revolution, that changes civilization in profound ways.  But what is going on right now is qualitatively different, he proceeds to say, because of the speed and breadth with which it is taking hold.

I enjoyed reading Tom's book a lot, and not just because I so strongly agreed with his points.  In recent talks I have been saying that we might be at the onset of a technology-enabled revolution that could have the impact on the 21st century that the Industrial Revolution had on previous generations.  I struggled with what to call this 21st century revolution -- until a colleague pointed out that it is up to future historians to name such societal changes, once it is clearer what they were and what their impact was.  In my talks, I have been using either Internet Revolution -- because I think that the explosion of the Internet in society around the mid '90s is what got things going in earnest -- or Business Process Revolution -- because, while the Internet and other technology advances have been the catalysts for change, the major transformations are taking place "up the stack" in businesses, industries, and whole economies.  The overall net effect is to link people, processes and information everywhere, i.e., to essentially flatten the world.

3rd Generation User Interfaces

One of the most exciting areas of innovation is emerging around what I'd like to call 3rd Generation User Interfaces or 3G/UI.  3G/UI,  inspired by game players, promises to bring highly visual, interactive interfaces to all sorts of applications in health care, education, science and business.  The reason this is such a huge deal is that every time a new paradigm emerges in the way people interact with computers, we've seen all kinds of new applications begin to appear, qualitatively better and different from anything before.  Furthermore, innovation in user interfaces soon gives rise to innovation in the programming and computing models needed to develop and run the new round of applications that they enable.

As a student at the University of Chicago in the '60s, I entered my programs and data onto punched cards, then brought the deck of cards to an operator and waited for the batch job to be run and the output printed.  Many a night, while waiting for the job to run, I went out with friends to Uno's or Due's, amazingly still serving deep dish pizza in Chicago's near North side, or to Taquerias de Mexico, a long gone little restaurant in what is now the Chicago Circle campus of the University of Illinois.  When I got back several hours later, I was hoping that my job had finished, and that I had not made a silly error that caused the job not to run.  Those were clearly slower -- if not necessarily kinder, gentler days.

Innovation and the Open Mind

A couple of weeks ago, I participated in a meeting on innovation with a number of executives from various companies that we hosted at IBM.  We spent the day presenting different aspects of our innovation programs, and had a very open dialogue on what we are doing, how we manage the programs and what lessons we have learned so far.   
 
One of the questions I was asked during my own presentation is how we select areas to focus on for innovation in IBM.  I told them that we wanted everyone in IBM to bring an open mind to whatever it is they do in their job and to look for ways to do them better.  Convincing people that innovation applies to everything, not just to R&D projects in our labs, is perhaps our biggest challenge and one of the major cultural barriers we need to overcome.

The Enduring Value of the Mainframe

I want to examine the mainframe -- specifically, why it is still around? And what does its survival teach us?

The IBM Mainframe is more than 40 years old, having been announced in April 1964. I have personally been associated with it for the better part of that time. In 1977, upon returning from a sabbatical to the Watson Research Center where I was a research staff member in Computer Sciences, I joined a project aimed at exploring what it would take to design a mainframe 20-times faster than our then-fastest machine, which ran at all of 5 MIPS (millions of instructions per second.).

Since then, many have predicted that the mainframe was dying and would soon disappear, some because they were competitors hoping to get customers to replace the mainframe with their product, others because they truly could not imagine anything this "old" still having value in an industry where new things show up at such an incredible rate.