March 20, 2000
I.B.M. Goes Countercultural With Linux
By STEVE LOHR
huge company with deep pockets, IBM can afford to dabble in
promising technologies. And that is what the International Business
Machines Corp. seemed to be doing throughout much of last year with
Linux, an increasingly popular version of the Unix operating system
that is available free on the Internet.
IBM dispatched emissaries to speak with members of the Linux
community, a worldwide network of programmers who develop and debug
the code. IBM met with academics, consultants, economists and
venture capitalists to plumb the Linux phenomenon. It made small
investments in a couple of Linux start-ups, and offered Linux on
one line of its computers.
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Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times
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Sam Palmisano, left, and Irving Wladawsky-Berger lead I.B.M.'s Linux push.
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But last fall, Big Blue suddenly got serious about Linux.
At the end of October, fresh from a global tour, Sam Palmisano,
a senior vice president, reported that the Internet companies he
spoke with told him that the preferred language of the young
programmers they were hiring was Linux.
At about the same time, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, an IBM
executive with longstanding ties to the nation's supercomputing
centers, was hearing that Linux was generating a lot of excitement
in these leading-edge research institutions. And he had been
sending e-mail to the company's other top technology executives
about the rise of Linux.
"In the technical community and in the marketplace,"
Wladawsky-Berger recently recalled, "the signs were clear that
something profound was going on."
Less than two months later, a few days before Christmas, IBM had
fashioned -- and Louis V. Gerstner Jr., the chairman, had approved --
an ambitious Linux strategy. The company that personifies
mainstream corporate computing had itself done something profound:
embrace Linux, a symbol of software's counterculture, as the
operating system of the future for the Internet.
IBM, it was decreed, would embark on a costly program to make
all its hardware and software work seamlessly with Linux. So
quickly did the company mobilize that even now hundreds of
engineers across the company are already engaged in the Linux
campaign, and IBM says its army of Linux engineers will number in
the thousands within a few years.
To be sure, other major companies in the industry, including
Hewlett-Packard, Dell Computer and Oracle, also have Linux efforts.
"But IBM has tightly focused on Linux more than any other big
company," observed Dan Kusnetzky, director of operating systems
research at the International Data Corp.
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Graph
Betting on Linux
Linux, the popular version of the Unix operating system that is available free on the Internet, is gaining ground.
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IBM's Linux strategy represents more than a bold, and risky,
step in the field of software. The move is a textbook example of
IBM's management style under Gerstner, who has worked to overhaul
the company and its culture since he arrived in 1993.
In the pre-Gerstner days, decision making at IBM was once
described as "swimming through peanut butter." But these days,
after a brief period of intense scrutiny -- during which the
company's technical experts play a key role -- choices are made
decisively and with remarkable swiftness, given that IBM is a
sprawling, $80-billion-a-year corporation.
In this most recent example, Palmisano, 48, who is regarded as a
leading candidate to someday succeed Gerstner, is the senior
executive who pushed most emphatically for the Linux initiative --
and has the most riding on its outcome. "This is Sam's bet,"
Wladawsky-Berger said.
The first step toward IBM's Linux strategy came in a Saturday
morning telephone call on Oct. 30 that Nick Bowen received at his
home in Newtown, Conn. The caller was his boss, Paul Horn, the head
of the IBM Watson labs. He told Bowen, a 39-year-old senior
researcher, that he would lead an 11-person team to make
recommendations on how IBM -- the entire company -- should adapt to
Linux. The investigation must be rigorous and exhaustive, Horn told
him -- and finished in seven weeks.
The Bowen report, submitted to top management on Dec. 20,
presented a plan for using Linux to undermine the software
advantage enjoyed by IBM's two key rivals, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. Microsoft's Windows NT and Sun's Solaris are the
leading operating systems used today on server computers, the
data-serving machines that are the engines of corporate networks
and the Internet.
To combat Sun and Microsoft, the report recommended, IBM should
retool all its server operating systems, from the mainframe OS/390
to AIX, IBM's version of Unix, to run Linux smoothly. The same
should be true of all IBM's database, Web applications and
messaging software, the report said. And IBM, the Bowen team
concluded, should push Linux as the operating system of choice for
the Internet -- more robust and reliable than Windows NT and
eventually overtaking Solaris, Sun's flavor of Unix, as the
industry standard for Unix.
The goal would be to win the hearts and minds of perhaps the
most influential audience in computing -- the software developers
who write the applications that bring the Web to life and make
Internet commerce actually work.
"Today, Microsoft and Sun dominate the application development
seats," the report stated. "We recommend that IBM aggressively
pursue a Linux-based application development platform. Doing so
would disrupt the Sun-Microsoft stranglehold."
The Linux strategy would "provide our server business with a
single, homogeneous server platform," from desktops to mainframes,
giving IBM a "level playing field" in software and allowing it to
compete with Sun and Microsoft for "mindshare in key software
growth segments and in universities."
The report, known as a "corporate assessment" inside IBM ran
just over 10 pages. In the pre-Gerstner days, such reports to top
management could be 100 pages in length. But today's IBM executives
are familiar with the Gerstner edict: If you cannot say it in 10
pages, you are not focused on the right thing.
It was only at the beginning of last October that Palmisano took
over IBM's server business. And he started at once to scout for
"major initiatives" to help revive the growth of IBM's big server
computers -- mainframes, minicomputers and AIX Unix machines. He
closely followed the activities of the Bowen assessment team, he
read early drafts of the group's report and he liked the finished
document: a coherent, top-to-bottom software strategy for IBM.
Moving quickly, he said, was imperative. "The Internet has
taught us all the importance of moving early, the advantage of
being a first-mover," Palmisano said in an interview. "We want to
be riding that Linux momentum at the front, not trailing it and
defending the past. IBM understands, believe me, what it means to
be defending the past."
When Bowen met on Dec. 20 with Palmisano and Nick Donofrio,
senior vice president for technology, at IBM's headquarters in
Armonk, N.Y., he noted a nontechnical recommendation in the report:
put one person in charge of the Linux effort companywide. "I'm
already working on that," Bowen recalls Palmisano saying.
And when Palmisano met with Gerstner two days later, the
chairman not only approved the plan but also agreed with his choice
of who should be the company's Linux czar: Wladawsky-Berger. At the
time, Wladawsky-Berger was general manager of the Internet
division, responsible for making sure Internet technology and an
Internet mindset was spread broadly throughout the company.
That job, Gerstner and Palmisano agreed, was done; IBM "got"
the Internet. Now, it was time for Wladawsky-Berger to move onto
the next, hearts-and-minds challenge. So the staff of the Internet
unit went elsewhere in the company, the division was folded and
Wladawsky-Berger assumed the title vice president of technology and
strategy in the computer-server group, headed by Palmisano.
They are a contrasting pair. Tall and physically imposing,
Palmisano is regarded as a brilliant executive and hard-charging
salesman. Previously, he ran the company's fast-growing global
services group, where he had a special talent for bringing in big
computer services deals, which can span several years and total
billions of dollars. Palmisano's nickname at IBM is "the closer."
Wladawsky-Berger is six years older and about a head shorter
than his boss. Raised in Cuba, he fled with his parents, Eastern
European immigrants who owned a store in Havana, when Castro came
to power in 1959. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University
of Chicago, speaks with a lilting Spanish accent and could easily
be mistaken for a college professor.
After his postgraduate studies, Wladawsky-Berger joined IBM's
Watson labs in 1970 as a researcher, but he had a taste for the
business side of the company as well. He led the drive to transform
IBM's traditional mainframes by retooling them with low-cost
microprocessors, the chips best known as the engines of personal
computers.
"The Linux issue," Wladawsky-Berger explained, "is whether
this is a fundamentally disruptive technology, like the
microprocessor and the Internet? We're betting that it is."
IBM's Linux effort is a long-term strategy, not one likely to
affect its quarterly earnings any time soon. And the strategy
appeals to IBM, in part, because it has lost its operating system
battles with Microsoft and Sun. Its effort in personal computer
software, OS/2, was quickly crushed by Microsoft's
market-dominating Windows. And IBM's AIX version of Unix has become
an also-ran behind Sun's more popular Solaris.
So IBM would love to drive the profit out of the operating
systems business of its rivals -- just as Microsoft did to Netscape,
the browser pioneer, by giving browsing software away free. "The
operating systems wars of today are the equivalent of the browser
wars of a few years ago," said Scott Hebner, an IBM software
executive. "The operating system is not where the value is."
Yet IBM's strategy can succeed only if Linux, which is
distributed free, does become a genuine alternative to Windows or
Solaris, thereby putting real pressure on their prices. And Linux
has a long way to go. Today, it is used mainly for simpler tasks,
like serving up Web pages, instead of for industrial-strength
computing chores like financial transaction systems that must
handle complex tasks, 24 hours a day, without crashing. Even IBM,
which plans eventually to use Linux as its unifying Unix platform
(shelving AIX), says Linux's true ascendance may not come for five
years or so -- until Linux is built up to become more powerful and
reliable.
Throughout the software field, the excitement surrounding Linux
has less to do with the technology itself than with the fact that
it is the leading example of so-called open-source software --
software that is distributed free, with its underlying source code
openly published, and is developed, debugged and improved by an
international community of programmers.
"It's the Web phenomenon coming to software development that is
intriguing," said Larry Smarr, director of the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications in Urbana-Champaign, Ill. "We now have
the potential for collaborative, decentralized software authorship
on large complex systems."
Still, it is unclear whether the open-source approach can solve
the kind of complex software problems that have consumed countless
programming hours and billions of dollars at Sun and Microsoft. And
for IBM, there is a question of whether the Linux community, which
works mostly on personal computers, will have much to contribute to
the company's Linux efforts on mainframes and minicomputers.
"Linux on non-PC platforms is a nonstarter," said Greg
Papadopoulos, chief technology officer for Sun Microsystems. "The
ecosystem of open source is not going to be working for IBM on
other platforms."
But Wladawsky-Berger says he will side with the recommendations
of IBM's best technical minds. "Not only did they say, 'Irving,
this is doable,"' he observed. "They said, 'Irving, do it."'
Certainly, veterans of the open-source counterculture seemed to
have welcomed Big Blue into the fold. "It should accelerate the
pace of adoption of Linux," said Eric Raymond, an evangelist of
the open-source movement.
"Sure, there's some irony here, since IBM used to be the
enemy," Raymond said. "But everybody in the community is happy
about IBM wanting to play with us."
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