Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President
newsroom.ibm.com
newsroom.ibm.com
Honestly, I thought IBM would be feel less rudderless with him at the helm. I wanted IBM to become more 'red' and not RH to become more 'big blue'- but it appears this isn't the case after all... seems like a short tenure.
Anyone know more about the new leadership?
In this case, I'd bet that it's Arvind Krishna pulling people out of IBM Cloud (his old division) to run the rest of "big blue"
And yes, IBM will basically bleed talent from Red Hat for the next 3 years until RHEL is a pale shadow of its former self.
https://www.google.com/maps/search/google,+dublin/@53.340165...
Most of the NeXT senior staff (jabs, avi, etc) Went on to take over roles at Apple. They also brought in all the NeXT technology and threw out Apples' Nextstep/Openstep->Mac OSX
When he returned, the workforce was pampered and attached to projects that weren't going anywhere. Steve removed a number of perks, and killed some of the biggest, most internally popular projects (Newton and OpenDoc come to mind). Lot's of people left.
But Steve came back to Apple as a savvy politician. He managed to get the board of directors in his back pocket, and sell his vision of Apple to the employees. Those that stayed, stayed because they came to believe in his vision, not because he placated them.
I will say this though, I think there's a truth underneath your statement. Apple attracted people who wanted to change the world. The culture may have been different, but there was still a core motivation in Apple employees that came from Steve's original vision of computing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15106802
Or just reach out for the Newton documentation, scattered about some sites,
That said, if someone makes an offer for a public company, the board does pretty much need to put it to a shareholder vote although they can negotiate for a higher price and ultimately make a recommendation. But it's up to the shareholders. They're the ones that own the company.
Founder's retain total voting control of the company and can do what they think is in the best interest of the company.
The board can complain and vote against it in favor of stupid short-term decisions that harm in the company, but in the end Zuck can tell them to fuck off and buy instagram because he thinks it's the right thing to do.
I also agree that for collaborative open source projects a different approach is often preferable (as well as governments too obviously).
Citation needed? Offhand, it's worked great for linux, and while perl and python have had some infamous problems, they don't seem particularly specific to the BDFL model, and they seemed to work well before that.
Because it's a tax write-off and makes for good press?
The aquiring company always makes promises they won't change the aquired company, the aquired company's management parrots that line and in the end, the aquired company always gets subsumed into the aquiring company.
This is a pretty strong statement. How is Red Hat more like IBM now?
To what they said "what is IBM??"
They know all the large tech companies but that one was a surprise to them, they had a look at Wikipedia and said "ah yes, it was a great company in your times".
Time to get some wine.
Edit: in today episode, hacker news forget they're a niche cohort.
IBM was synonymous with PC for quite some time.
So I'd argue IBM was a household name as far back as the mid-80s.
This is not true.
I'm curious to see data on this. My guess is that in the early to mid 80s, IBM had to have been the top consumer technology brand. At least in knowledge of the brand, even if they didn't own one. Their Charlie Chaplin ads were everywhere, then they spent an enormous amount of money marketing PCjr[1].
[1] - "As part of $32.5 million in advertising for the computer during 1984, it began what the company described as the most extensive marketing campaign in IBM history, in which 98% of Americans would see at least 30 PCjr advertisements in the last four months of the year". (From Wikipedia)
They were a huge deal.
I feel like any deal involving IBM at that level would involve some absurd amount of bureaucracy, even back then.
Even if this were the case, they would have been part of nearly every office in one way or another and they certainly are not now.
> "The PC was IBM's first attempt to sell a computer through retail channels [...] they partnered with the retail chains ComputerLand and Sears Roebuck"
> "Reception was overwhelmingly positive [...] the IBM PC immediately became the talk of the entire computing industry.[38] Dealers were overwhelmed with orders [...] By the time the machine was shipping, the term "PC" was becoming a household name.[39] [...] Sales exceeded IBM's expectations by as much as 800%, shipping 40,000 PCs a month at one point.[40] The company estimate that 50 to 70% of PCs sold in retail stores went to the home."
It is worth noting how small the market was at the time though, "In 1983 they sold more than 750,000 machines" - Apple has just passed 100,000,000 iPhone 12s in six months since launch.
which is the goddamn point. it was a name in tech circles, and this community forgets how small tech circles were back then
heck, someone even cited the cell processor in playstation. outside the nerdiest of gamers, very few actually cared, and the name that stuck and resonated from that item was playstation, not ibm anyway.
want some name that public would recognize in the 80s? try nintendo and sega.
>>>> I told my teen children "... a company like IBM". To what they said "what is IBM??"
kid back then would have had the same reaction as the gp kids at hearing ibm.
this community is completely out of touch and filled with vitriol.
the whole thing was an answer to this:
>>>> I told my teen children "... a company like IBM". To what they said "what is IBM??"
answer wouldn't have changed in the sixties, seventies, nor eighties. mayyybe in the nineties, for the short period laptop became sought after and thinkpad the peak of the form factor.
I'm pretty sure I would have known most of the largest US companies as a teen, including IBM, because of their cultural ubiquity, not because I had a PC (which didn't exist).
??
In 1997, IBM Deep Blue beat chess Grandmaster Gary Kasparov and made international news. IBM sponsored the Olympic Games for 40 years, they sponsored the 1995 Wimbledon tennis tournament, the ATP Tour, the US Open, French Open, Australian Open tennis tournaments, the Masters golf tournament, baseball games, auto racing, college football. Dave Bowman wore an IBM logo on his spacesuit in 2001 A Space Odyssey while people argued that "HAL 9000" was based on "IBM" with the letters shifted.
"At the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia, IBM demonstrates the largest integrated information technology system ever seen by a mass audience."
"The National Hockey League, in partnership with IBM, form an alliance - NHL Interactive Cyber Enterprises - that will use new and emerging technology to promote the growth of hockey worldwide. The Professional Golf Association of America teams with IBM to present a state-of-the-art cybercast of the 78th PGA Championship which takes place in August in Louisville, Kentucky"
"IBM is the largest corporate contributor in 1996. Over the last decade, IBM has contributed more than $1.3 billion to nonprofit organizations, schools and universities - close to four million hours of volunteer time in the United States alone,"
"[1997] The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recognizes IBM for outstanding contributions in protecting the Earth's ozone layer."
"[1998] U.S. Vice President Al Gore announces Blue Pacific - the world's fastest computer - which is jointly developed by the U.S. Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM"
"[1998] The Guiness Book of Records officially recognizes IBM for setting two world records in Internet traffic on the 1998 Nagano Olympic Winter Games Web site: "The Most Popular Internet Event Ever Recorded""
I can imagine that there were people who had never heard of them, but they were an enormous company with fingers in hundreds of pies, in the news often, in all sorts of ways - business, finances, sports, environmental, education, charity, employment, investment in factories - in newspapers, magazines, talking head pieces, they were as household name as any massive company, nothing like the "do you know the manufacturer of the Playstation graphics chip???" that you're presenting them as.
IBM had adverts on ordinary TV, like a $40M campaign for adverts with the M A S H actors - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbH50T9jxVI
System to help children with speech impediments - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTKocB22aH4
Speech recognition system, 1986 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pNGO5ppfQ8
Olympic Fencing commercial, 1996 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJznrbLZoTE
PS/1 advert, 1990 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aam5VgLX9ys
Pink Panther themed 486 advert - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS095Os84-I
Netherlands PC ad, 1990 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g0VwEgRzTQ
French advert - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OyZWQUewfQ
etc. etc.
To have not heard of them at all whatsoever in the 1990s you don't need to be outside a business, you need to be under a rock, basically never see a TV, newspaper, hear a radio news broadcast, watch a sporting event with sponsor logos, visit any city with billboards, or be tangential to any of their hundreds of thousands of employees, none of your parents or your friends parents working for them, or anything. It really isn't like "can you name the senior vice presidents of CK Prahalad's management consultancy". It's more like "yeah of course teens haven't heard of Ford or FedEx, they don't buy pickup trucks and aren't logistics specialists".
> "discounting the rampant americentrism"
I'm not American. But if your position is reduced to "a North Korean farmer's child wouldn't have heard of them", then it's not a very strong position.
How, from a funny/nostalgic comment can you derive something like that?
In my world (France, mid-late 80's) IBM was known by everyone because computer = IBM. And computer = important, apparently.
Also the legend of 2001 Space Odyssey's "HAL = IBM shifted by one" was very much live.
In addition to other examples in the thread, OS/2 Warp was a direct competitor to Windows 95. We could be using OS/2 today instead of Windows had it become successful.
Don't you mean NCR, even in light of what IBM did for cash registers?
"How're you gonna do it? You're gonna PS/2 it!"
And maybe, just maybe, my memory is bad. But I really feel almost gaslit. Like where someone is telling me my lived experience wasn't my lived experience. I remember IBM as one of the most recognizable brands of the time. I recall in social studies class a teacher talking about how IBM sold calculating devices to Nazi Germany during the war. I remember another class where we discussed IBMs infamous "THINK" posters, which we discussed in relation to propaganda and subliminal messaging. I remember that THINK poster showing up as a gag in the early Simpsons TV show. When Apple made the famous super bowl commercial where the athlete throws a sledge-hammer at the George Orwell-esque Big Brother screen, every news outlet was going on-and-on about how it was a direct attack on IBM and the stodgy perception that PCs were only for business. And of course the whole Deep Blue chess match. Heck, even the Jeopardy Watson thing had IBM branding all over it. In all of those cases IBM had a cultural currency that anchored the discussion.
I would honestly be completely and genuinely surprised to find any people in my age group born and raised in North America wouldn't immediately recognize the IBM brand.
When I think of niche tech brands from that time I believe Oracle and Cisco fit that "you only know if you know" kind of niche. But IBM? It actually feels so completely unbelievable to me that it can't be true. But hey, maybe you're right and I'm wrong?
At some point IBM sold off the unit, vacated the office block, and the street was renamed to that of the new company that moved in. Eventually, all the shuttle workers would be laid off after the demise of the program, so it's sad to see how it all ended.
I wonder if the children of FAANG employees would feel similar to what you felt. I suspect that may not be the case, since most companies don't really make such long term investments anymore.
I might be wrong though. I just see the growth of China and decline of the US, and I cannot stop feeling like those two are connected. But what do I know. People were afraid about Japan before.
Except for top performers and people inheriting great wealth, Americans really need to adjust their expectations of what their material life will be. Happily, I see this in young people who aren’t buying into materialism and prefer life style, travel, etc. and realize that living within their means is better than long term debt.
Luckily I know nothing about IBM, only the spectrum protect backup... I mean why everything has to be so complicated? Ugly?
Props for having documentation + they support lots of OSes and features. But when it comes to management... even Linux people in my office make fun of that product, because how awkward, complex and time consuming it is to do particular tasks there. I showed Veeam admin some spectrum protect stuff, because he had todo some task there... He just laughed out loud.
[0] https://freakonomics.com/2008/04/17/our-daily-bleg-did-ibm-r...
Anyways, I get that IBM is a big whale. It just i rather avoid their products.
But speaking for spectrum protect... the more I think of it, the more I understand that it is the configuration and usage of the product I really dislike. And the embarrassment of helping customers configuring/troubleshooting that product. Otherwise it is solid. Once configured, does its job pretty well and solid. And we are a service provider - it was actually capable of providing with the feature set a service provider needs to.
In fact, Netflix is only there nowadays to avoid the acronym from becoming offensive.
Take a look at levels 62 / 63 at MS vs. comparable roles at FAANGs: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,Facebook,Micro...
My understanding of FANG initially was that it was about tech stock performance and not compensation.
Yes, I know them from computing history lectures, and I liked their ThinkPads (but they sold that to Lenovo when I was in high school).
I have only directly interacted with IBM product once, and that was Lotus Notes in one corporation I worked as a tech support in university years. And it was horrible.
At university, I thought of IBM as "they do things that are invisible but probably important?", but now I guess they don't do even that.
The problem was that it has serious scaling issues, and when you move mail to it (and remember it has to do the synchronisation step when you return) it can bog down both the server And the client. It was far less efficient than, say, pop and imap.
IBM took a bet that they could make Notes scale to the entire org in the mid-to-late ‘90s, and it took many years to get there and much pain along the way.
Any large and crufty system can start to have problems as they grow older but “fixing notes” wasn't a programming issue but a design one.
In todays terminology, it would be the equivalent of a replicated/distributed MongoDB with the designated “master” on the server, with a cached full copy of that database on your laptop (which isn't permanently connected), while allowing writes in both partitions (ie sacrificing consistency for availability) and then hoping when you connect it back up again that it can figure out the bidirectional sync and resolve any conflicts that occur.
And then on top of that build a mail client which stores one mail message per row (including all attachments) along with status bits (read, important, replied etc) and hope to heck it all works.
Lotus Notes “synchronization” was the step you did after docking your thinkpad just before going to get your first coffee of the day, because hopefully the latency would be hidden by the brewing time.
Sorry you got drawn on a goose chase.
And red hat /openshift is huge in germany. Only startups run on k8s... Especially in insurance and banking.
It definitely felt like an "old" company even then. I remember they were very big on patents and were proud of the fact that they had a huge patent war chest.
I'm not sure if you're trying to imply causation here, but vast sweeping changes like this rarely happen in a matter of days - it's far more likely that this has been in the works for a while, and the email mess is coincidental.
- IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources[1]
- IBM email fiasco complicates sales deals, is worse than biz is letting on[2]
Whoa.
How do you fail an email migration and not have email for your employees? How do you let this affect billing and invoices?
Why haven't they at least set up something temporary?
Yes, just spin up e-mail addresses for 400,000 people in 177 countries. No problem. Just run it on a Raspberry Pi in the basement.
Focus on the core business competencies, of which email is clearly not one.
Edit since I can't reply: An extended email outage isn't a good look either. If IBM can't run their own critical systems, why trust them with yours? I personally think making the strategic decision to outsource demonstrates the ability and desire to find timely solutions.
If their main revenue is doing consulting for businesses and their own IT projects have horrible failures why would you pick them?
Its like hearing your plumber has leaking and broken pipes in their house.
Why?
Because the money making was more important (getting projects, sending seniors and principals off to projects etc)
TLDR: due to a bad email migration, IBM has had massive email issues. Even the representative for the company had to give the statement to the press over the phone.
Microsoft was like IBM after Bill Gates. Not a tech leader for many years until Microsoft pivot to Cloud computing and software as services.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=ibm+pho...
https://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-can...
In France we've had to deal with LOUVOIS, the payroll software for all the armed branches, being an unending train wreck. There were quite a few families of deployed soldiers who had to deal with near-bankruptcy because of it.
Microsoft was still overwhelmingly a product company in the decade after Gates. It did not abandon its product-centric focus and switch to a service-centric business model ala IBM. IBM hasn't been a product heavy company in several decades at this point. Microsoft never stopped being product heavy.
IBM liquidated its core product businesses, one after another. Microsoft never did that.
Microsoft's sales increased dramatically during the Ballmer years, going from $23b in 2000 to $77b in 2013. IBM's sales haven't increased like that in decades (quite the opposite in fact, they've had a stagnant or contracting business for a long time).
The cloud boom that Microsoft is currently enjoying, was planted during the Ballmer era, and it's being very successfully harvested during the Nadella era.
Nadella is a superior CEO to Ballmer, and far superior at product. However Ballmer did not wreck the ship nor switch Microsoft to being primarily service focused in the model of IBM. IBM by contrast is a wrecked ship.
However, his start also coincided with then end of the really fun times.
I won't say things totally changed but, as is necessary as you grow, more process was put in place, there was a more deliberate use of data, a shift from "random acts" that made sense in isolation to more programmatic ways of doing things.
These things weren't bad and were in fact needed. But, even if Red Hat wasn't really still a startup when Whitehurst took over, it wasn't really a mature large company either.
All you ever hear about is how challenging Kubernetes is to manage. IBM invested in self managed Kubernetes essentially while everyone else built SaaS Kubernetes Engine’s.
IBM feels like a collection of revenue lines that hasn’t really tapped into any new streams lately.
That being said, I'm not sure why I would leverage OpenShift on IBM Cloud when I can get practically the same thing from the other providers with a stronger ecosystem of tooling.
Which leads me back to OpenShift on-premise and I'm just not sure that is where the market is at or headed right now.
IBM Cloud gets new OpenShift features quicker than other cloud providers.
But Jim leaving does make it look less likely that IBM will be turning into RedHat anytime soon.
From what I'm told RedHat continues operating as an independent business unit under IBM.
Edit: full disclosure; I too am considering RedHat, as I'd like to resume full-time work on systemd/journald in the future and there aren't exactly many places employing people to work on upstream systemd. So I may be biased in wanting to believe the above is true, grain of salt and all.
Source: former IBMer, current Red Hatter
Back in the Thinkpad era, IBM had a lot of cool stuff going on. But now it seems like a shadow.
Watson and IBM cloud look like flops. The email fiasco is weird and should never have happened.
What did buying Red Hat accomplish? As an outsider, it doesn't seem to have infused any new ideas, and the changes to centos just made people move further away AFAIK.
Or buying stuff like the Weather Channel?
The chip business looks promising. Maybe IBM should double down there?
Consulting, in general, seems to not be a great tool to sharpen internal capability. The constant layoffs of the past have also had a hugely deleterious effect.
I am not an IBMer though have worked with many former IBM folks, and work with Red Hat on and off every month or so. From what I've gathered, Red Hat is the new core of IBM. The goal is to grow Red Hat, specifically their OpenShift offering (which is huge in gov't as it allows for hybrid clouds), and make centre the biz around that then the "traditional" IBM consulting style.
On the IBM side, weird shit is a foot. The GTS spinoff into Khndryl is very, very bizarre. They're a profitable part of IBM but need to be excised, quickly? It's causing chaos for accounts that had deep GTS coverage as the account teams are basically adversarial. The rest of IBMs portfolio is stagnating as they chase fads and lose to niche players with better overall value. Especially with the Data/AI space, startups are killing them.
Now try explaining to the customer why IBM is recommending an IBM's competitor while IBM is also offering the same product with a better price directly to the customer. It doesn't make sense at all.
Consider two service-focused business units (GTS and GBS) that sometimes are complementary but mostly adversarial and it is chaos for the customer.
Spinning-off GTS (and I dare say, GBS too) is better for the customer and for the product business units.
I think a lot of Red Hatters are tired of having the IBM sales force show up in their OpenShift accounts asking about upgrading them to Cloud Paks.
I remember their stuff from the pre-Thinkpad era. Quite a company. Working for both a large competitor and for a small company that was trying to sell to them they seemed clumsy but still had an amazing portfolio.
My guess is that they just need to merge/break-up/reconfigure into oblivion. Just another AT&T/HP/ITT/Polaroid/Xerox
Anyhow I wonder if this better-than-thou, stuffy corporate attitude leads itself to internal re-org cycles where it results in no identity and no central vision, just internal battles.
It seems like other similar size large companies, like Apple, can be successful so maybe their leadership doesn't show these character traits?
While many poor decisions were made inside of the company, I ultimately blame Wall Street for IBM's downfall. Remember that back in 2011, Palmisano finished strong with IBM's Watson winning Jeopardy, IBM Software delivering consistent >80% profit margins on $10Bs in revenue, and a strong services backlog.
Many don't know that Palmisano's departure was preceded by a Wall Street mediated competition for the successor. IBM Software Group SVP, Steve Mills, was the obvious choice. The guy was a lifetime IBMer, intellectually superb, allegedly with photographic memory, effective public speaker, and with a proven history of leading (at the time) the 3rd largest software business in the world.
Unfortunately, Wall Street didn't like Mills because he did not come across well on CNBC. The guy is chubby and doesn't look like a conventional CEO. So Ginny Rometty, with a claim to fame based on building IBM Global Business Services from on the PwC acquistion became the leading candidate. Ginny is "media friendly" and the diversity factor didn't hurt.
Once Ginny came on board, leadership style changed from long-term to fickle and neurotic. Instead of committing to the hard work of building complex technology (e.g. cloud), any signs of technological challenges became reasons for business strategy changes at the top level. What started as a build decision (IBM SmartCloud) turned into a buy decision (Softlayer), followed by a build decision (IBM Bluemix), and so on.
However, Ginny's biggest failure was her inability to raise capital on Wall Street. IBM's engineers weren't failing at building cloud technology because the engineers were terrible (some were, normal distribution rules still apply) but because cost cutting policies starved engineering teams though attrition and lack of hiring. Staffing a team meant bringing in internal hires w/o the right skill set or taking a gamble on offshore (global) resource. At the same time Google was hiring left and right with comparative ease (as an aside, now they are dealing with the consequences).
Bottom line, Ginny couldn't get the capital to fund internal engineering efforts for the scale of the transformation needed to sustain IBM's success with machine learning (Watson) and cloud.
I place the blame on Wall Street since they made the bet on Ginny and then left her out to dry.
IBM has been essentially a financial engineering machine for many years, with their ridiculous 5-year EPS targets and all the rest of it. While I was there they even removed plants, copiers, coffee machines, televisions, pads, pencils, pens and everything else in sight to "save" money.
The "leadership" of IBM drove the company in to the ground, period.
You just answered your own question. As I pointed out, leadership was "picked" by Wall Street investors. Share buybacks and financial engineering exist to keep the investors happy.
If they didn't buy back shares and invested in R&D the stock would have gone straight down instead of sideways. As I said the leadership "couldn't get the capital to fund internal engineering efforts for the _scale_ of the transformation needed to sustain IBM's success"
In the five years since you left IBM in 2016, GOOG has tripled in value, while IBM has lost 8 percent. I think I know which set of consequences I'd prefer to deal with as an executive, shareholder, or employee.
I agree completely that the change in leadership marked an inability to really bring WATSON to market, and some other products too.
While I was an intern, I sat next to ExtremeBlue interns and team members working on Watson. The technology was awesome and they were working like mad. Sleeping under the desk. By 2015 the push had stopped and everyone knew it was a failure to launch.
Watson for all it's academic glory, was kind of vapourware as a product.
It just never really did anything materially useful. They did a lot of hospital trials that fizzled. Way, way over-promised.
A little bit along the lines of ElementAI - it's hard to commercialized AI directly.
Google et. al. do it right by incrementally improving things like translation, voice recognition ... it's making waves within academia for it's quality, but it's something consumers are hardly aware of.
Since IBM is not a consumer company, there's only so much sugar and hype that Watson can provide (winning Jeopardy was a brilliant thing) before the rubber has to hit the rode.
I'm not so sure if it's fair to blame a new leader for that one ... because I'm not sure what a realistic business application for Watson would be. (Maybe there are hard and real products, but they're probably going to be very context specific etc..)
Building great tech is hard enough, then building great products on top of that - just as hard. Doing it within a massive multinational that makes it's money from grifting governments and megacorps into paying for really expensive services probably just is not going to work.
MS, Google, FB ... they have the operational fidelity and product line to leverage AI internally, IBM, not so much.
I don't know what the future of IBM looks like aside from just being another Accenture.
Ultimately much of the system had to be rewritten and this took years by which time, it was just another competitor in a crowded market
I always thought IBM should have bought ARM, the combination of IBM chip tech plus ARMs designs and Red Hat for the software stack would make for an amazing tech business.
I dunno...they've been building processors since the 1950s.
Starting in the late 2000s and early 10s, executives were crying for 'cloud skills' as part of their continuous 'workforce remix'. Did Amazon build AWS by hiring cloud skills? Of course not. You build a cloud with a wide array of talent including hardware, chip design, software, and systems engineering. IBM had all that available in house.
Am I the only one who feels like IBM could be circling the drain like when they missed out on PCs?
He let thousands of IBM point of sale systems to be replaced with crap that can't buffer keystrokes - instead of modernizing the SDKs for those who know Linux and not AIX.
He bought RedHat, but not Digital Ocean so they had a cloud consumers trust.
He didn't win a serious contract with Facebook for kernel tuning. He didn't win a serious contract with AWS for AWS Linux 3.
He let COBOL and APL continue to die instead of funding modern tooling.
PS: After an experimental physics colloquia on their campus up the hill, IBM Almaden offered me a paid dark matter RA job when I was 15. It didn't happen thanks to sabotaging parents. Also, a computer scientist-programmer lady from IBM volunteered her time at my high-school which was really cool.
The man who sold the red hat to big blue?