Waking up IBM

In the early 1990s, IBM was a has-been. Fujitsu, Digital Equipment, and Com paq were hammering down its hardware margins. EDS and Andersen Consulting w ere stealing the hearts of ClOs. Intel and Microsoft were running away with PC profits. Today, Big Blue is back on top, a leader in e-business services. This is th e story of how the company, which had lagged behind every computer trend si nce the mainframe, caught the Internet wave. Much of the credit for the tur naround goes to a small band of activists who built a bonfire under IBM's r ather broad behind. It started in February 1994, when a lone midlevel IBM programmer watched Su n Microsystems pirate IBM's Winter Olympics data for its own rogue Web site . Dave Grossman knew that IBM's muckety-mucks were clueless about the Web. But he was convinced that if nothing changed Sun would eat Big Blue's lunch . Frustrated in his attempts to warn executives over the phone, he drove down to Armonk, walked straight into headquarters with a UNIX workstation in hi s arms, set it up in a closet, and demonstrated the future of computing to a trio of IBM execs. One of them was John Patrick, head of marketing for th e hugely successful ThinkPad, who quickly became his mentor. Together, buil ding simultaneously from the top and the bottom of the organization through an ever-widening grassroots coalition of technicians and executives, they put IBM on the Web and morphed it into an e-business powerhouse. People who want to foment similarly successful insurrections can learn a lot from the ir example.