Random thoughts

When an esteemed colleague recently began his well-earned retirement after 40 years of service, I thought to myself: Wow, that's half a lifetime! I'm not quite there yet, but it's already been 35 years since I entered that building at the Donaukanal for the first time and started working for IBM, first as an intern, then as a part-time employee while at university, and at some point becoming a full-time employee.

To celebrate my anniversary, I took a day off today and recharged by batteries with a short run in the park enjoying the beautiful day.

A lot has changed over the years, not the least myself, other things have stayed the same:

• The IBM mainframe that accompanied me in the first few years is still alive and well, and the ISPF dialogs look sufficiently similar that I can still find my way around easily.
• Storage technology probably has evolved more than anything else. We all have storage capacity in our mobile devices that matches what we had available in a national data center at the time.
• Artificial intelligence was still in its infancy back then, and the elective subject in my computer science degree only included a few courses on neural networks and language comprehension.
• Mobile working, which made it possible to solve technical problems remotely without having to stay in the office with a sleeping bag (yes, I did that too!), was introduced at IBM early on, and continues to enable flexible and successful global collaboration despite some recent adjustments.
• Lastly, cybersecurity and data privacy, my long-term professional hobbies, became my primary job responsibility more than five years ago.

One thing that has not changed is that it is still the IBM people who are the most important reason to work here. Thank you to all wonderful people who I have had the pleasure to work with over so many years, and looking forward to more to come.

Labels: ibm, personal

The IBM homepage launched on May 24, 1994. What started with a few pages and an audio welcome message evolved into a global web presence, and I am honored that I have taken part in that journey. Hard to believe it's been 25 years already.


Happy birthday, www.ibm.com, and welcome to the Quarter Century Club!

Related links:

• IBM
• IBM homepage history in screenshots by IBM's first corporate webmaster, Ed Costello

Labels: ibm, technology, webdevelopment

 

Labels: ibm, personal

When the World Wide Web was created 25 years ago few people probably realized how much change this would bring, not only to the academic community where this started but to the world at large.

Twenty years ago, IBM published the first homepage on www.ibm.com. The initial site on May 24, 1994 had only a few pages of content and an audio greeting by then-CEO and Chairman Lou Gerstner. (That was the time when most homepages greeted visitors with “Welcome to the Internet”.) Among the things Gerstner said, in retrospective the most important statement was “We are committed to the Internet, and we are excited about providing information to the Internet community”.

Back then I was happily coding System/370 mainframe applications and just had my first encounter with the now defunct Trojan Room Coffee Machine at the University of Cambridge. SNA and Token Ring were our preferred network technologies, and access to the Internet required special permission and signing an NSFnet Acceptable Use Policy document outlining the rules for commercial activities on international networks. Soon much of our business would become e-business.

Only a few years later was I invited to join the www.ibm.com team, a very fine, special team. At a time when business was mainly local, we were already globally integrated, collaborating electronically through an internal IRC network (Alister, remember our daily "gma, hay?" routine) and eventually the predecessor of IBM Sametime.

Last week the creators of the first homepage and some who worked in Corporate Internet Programs in the early days came together in New York City for an unofficial “motherserver meeting” to celebrate the anniversary. I missed the party, but the pictures brought back memories of the good times (and yes, occasionally bad times) we had running the IBM Website.

Happy Birthday, www.ibm.com!

Labels: ibm, technology

This year marks IBM's 100th anniversary. Few companies can say that they have been around that long, especially in high tech industries.

The IBM Centennial Film: 100×100 shows IBM's history of innovation, featuring one hundred people who present the IBM achievement recorded in the year they were born, and bridges into the future with new challenges to build a smarter planet.



Another 30-minute video tells the story behind IBM inventions and innovations.



For more than twenty years I have not just worked for IBM but been a part of IBM. It has been a pleasure, and I certainly look forward to many more to come!

I am an IBMer.

Labels: business, ibm, innovation, technology

While shopping on Amazon the other day, I noticed a subtle yet still noticeable hint that I had bought the very same article already in October 2007.


At first glance, the notice would appear to drive customers away from buying; however Amazon.com has a long-standing reputation for innovation in online commerce and good customer service (although I have been less satisfied with their handling of e-mail correspondence lately) so this didn't come as a complete surprise.

Good user experience design is all about delivering value to the customer, and to the business too:

• The customer may have bought the product earlier and order another copy as a present, which was actually the case for me.
• Some products, such as blank CDs/DVDs, lend themselves to repetitive orders. Knowing that this is the same product ordered before is reassuring to the customer, which means more business with fewer clicks.
• In the unlikely case that a customer accidentally orders the same product twice, chances are that she would return the product for a refund, incurring shipping and handling cost for the business; therefore not shipping the product in the first place is not only the most customer friendly, but also the most cost effective solution.

On a related note, Amazon.com has also been innovative in offering pay-as-you-go Web infrastructure, and IBM recently announced plans to deliver software through their Amazon Web Services platform.

Links:

• Amazon.com
• Amazon.de

Labels: business, ibm, kudos, technology

Google search nicely reminded me that digital storage is still all about ones and zeros:

Labels: ibm, technology