Hibbing, Minnesota, and Armonk, New York, were united on July 20. In both places, it was a difficult Thursday. Reliable sources indicate it was a very nice day indeed elsewhere. In Hibbing, a chopsticks factory closed, reportedly $7m in debt. The plant, equipped with high technology production machinery, apparently never reached its daily target of seven million waribashi, as the Japanese call disposable chopsticks. Japanese use upwards of 125 million pairs of waribashi every day. Governor Rudy Perpich, born in Hibbing, was understandably embarrassed by the closure. He helped the company arrange $4.5m in public funding. For the time being, this leaves Hibbing with one other hero, Robert A Zimmerman. No direction home The son of local merchants, Zimmerman was a famous entertainer 20 years ago. He worked under the name Bob Dylan then, and is still using that moniker in his recent attempt to make a comeback at age 48. The only other celebrity remotely connected with Hibbing is Marco Polo. Polo was hot stuff 700 years ago. In 1271, he left Venice with his father, Niccolo, and an uncle, Maffeo, and wound up working for Kublai Khan, a Mongol who ran China. Mr Kublai liked Polo so much he wouldn’t let him return to Italy for something like 17 years, and only then because of an errand that needed running. A princess had to be delivered to a suitor in Persia. By the time Polo reached his goal, the groom-to-be had croaked; the princess got stuck with a brother. Out of the Khan’s clutches, Polo made for home in time for supper in 1295. Three years later, while skippering a naval galley, Polo was captured. He spent a year in a Genoa slammer. While there, Polo ponied up story after story to a cellmate; some of them seem to be true. One tale has to do with noodles. Polo may have brought pasta technology from China to Italy. He did not, however, have the same luck with eating instruments. The Italians don’t use waribashi for leverage over their linguine. And as for the Chinese, they still only eat with one implement common in the West. It figures in the famous dialogue between Polo and the Khan, wherein the Great One asks the explorer, Whose was that ladle I saw you with last night. Polo replied, That was no ladle, that was my knife. They may be unaware of Marco Polo’s chopsticks connection in Hibbing. By Hesh Wiener As for Armonk, the Mandarins there had to eat crow, with or without the help of chopsticks. A product that the company sorely needed to please customers and shareholders alike failed to pass muster. The coming-out party for one of IBM’s two strategic mainframe disk families for the 1990s was cancelled. Heads will roll over this one. But with 3380-Ks still being patched up, Big Blue is in no position to announce any products that might push up daisies once they’re in the field. IBM’s courage in this matter is to be commended. With no rental base to cushion it from the shocks of product cycles, the manufacturer is hard pressed to pump out new machines on schedule. Investors usually don’t want to hear IBM using such four-letter words as long and term. But somebody in the corporate Forbidden City, perhaps Grand Pooh Bah Akers himself, saw what lay ahead if IBM were to ship a risky disk. That somebody said Whoa!, or maybe it was Woe. In any event, it worked, brilliantly. IBM showed it would put integrity ahead of the quarterly flim-flam that has all too often gotten the best of well-intentioned public corporations. One can expect the same treatment for other IBM products, no matter how crucial their announcements may be. We would be shocked and dismayed if the next generation of mainframes was announced before it was thoroughly shaken down. So, too, for the large-capacity, small-diameter disk clusters we expect to come onstream next year. IBM’s newfound sensitivity did not arise by chance. The company has unquestionably suffered greatly as a result of its hasty deployment of 3380K disks and 3090S processors. But whatever the cause, Big Blue’s critics and competitors, who, like many customers, had grown to believe IBM wa
s a consummately hubristic outfit, have been proved wrong. Historians of industry will note the 20th of Julius Caesar’s eponymous month as the date on which IBM veered away from a potential disaster slated for the 25th. If the company were to pick a moment of mettle, this would be it. Blood on the tracks For after years of brickbats, some undoubtedly deserved, and quarter after quarter of disappointing reports to shareholders, John Akers and his team have shown that they are not only capable of learning from their errors, but that they are willing to do so. In the past, IBM touted the superiority of thermal conduction modules, even as it missed its production goals for the components. It boasted of the recording density of large disks even as it shipped machines destined to fail for want of a proper bearing. It hawked ageing equipment even as it readied the boxes that would decimate installed iron. And, amazingly, got away with it. Maybe IBM could get away with it still. But it chose not to. This time IBM played it straight. IBM’s is a far better way to run a business than that of the chopsticks folks in Hibbing, who kept kidding themselves… until they got their just desserts. Copyright (C) 1989 Technology News of America Co Inc.
