This is legendary. How did he convince the board members that its good for business
The cynic in me automatically answers, "They realized they could not compete in the space, so figured, why not wage a PR campaign against those that are competing successfully?
Its reasonable to be cynic about any for profit corporation. On the other hand facial recognition is not yet dominated by any single organization and IBM can enter if they really wanted to, so i guess there is some good faith involved.