Seemed like a pivotal time in IBM's history. IBM in 1993 was looking face to face with irrelevance during his tenure after mainframes being evergreen declared relics, and losing the bus wars in the PC industry. IBM in 2002 was still an interesting R&D and products company. Unfortunately the talent bleed off has been continuous from that time and neither the R&D nor the products are as astonishing versus the competition as they used to be. At least no follow on CEO has been daft enough to undercut the mainframe business so far, but they did miss the timing and limp execution on plenty of things.. POWER8 was almost perfectly positioned to be the AI interconnect and glue of choice.