During the 1994 Winter Olympics, an employee of IBM, that held exclusive rights to the telecast, went looking for the results on the brand-new World Wide Web. But he didn't find them on IBM's website – they didn't have one. He found them on a rival company's website. This is the story of the forward-thinking team that convinced decision-makers to wake up to the Internet, which influenced a tectonic shift in everything about IBM as an organization.
Do you remember where you were in February of 1994 while the Winter games were being played in Lillehammer, Norway?
Dave Grossman does so at home at night.
I'd watch my skiing and stuff, and I'd see these ads, these IBM ads, and I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool.
I work for IBM.
At the time, Dave was a computer engineer for IBM who weren't just one of the Olympics main sponsors.
IBM had worked for two years to build the computer infrastructure necessary to collect and process event results.
And while Dave watched the games at home, on tv, at work, he had access to something really brand new, the World Wide Web.
But when he looked up Olympic results, they were being posted not by IBM, but by one of their main competitors, Sun Microsystems.
I remember, I was just like, what in the world is going on here?
What was going on was that IBM's Olympic results were being posted on Sun's webpage.
And then I guess I got kind of pissed, to be honest.
Cause basically it dawned on, it worked out that they were stealing.
But here's the thing.
Even though IBM was the world's biggest computer company, they couldn't do much about Sun Microsystems, because, believe it or not, in February of 94, IBM didn't have a website.
They didn't think the Internet mattered for their business.
As longtime Ibmer John Patrick points out.
I remember that the head of marketing at IBM didn't allow people to put their email address on a business card.
IBM bosses thought an email address would make your business card look cluttered.
But Dave knew that this mentality needed to change.
He knew the Internet was the future.