Ibm Cultural Assumption

IbmCulturalAssumption before LouGerstner days

An early assumption made by IBM was that the limited number of available programmers constrained their ability to sell computers. This had a number of interesting ramifications...
The 'hermetically sealed environment' that contained only IBM products was another assumption made by IBM in the days that the vast majority of all available computer cycles were produced under an IBM logo.
The belief that IBMers knew what the customers needed better than they did...
- This could become an interesting tangent that may intersect some of the current UserStory threads. As part of a small set of people that are discussing how we might extend the BmoMech page, we spent some time debating our views of the fact that when this massive development was started in the last 1960s, there was an insuffiecient pool of available programming skill. The decision was to 'sort' the tens of thousands of existing employees according to their likely programming capabilities and then 'promote' the best candidates. One result that now (with the passage of some time) appears very much more significant, is that the programmers fully understood the user requirements, having all started their careers as Bankers.
The confidence that any IBM product would become a de facto industry standard...
....

The original two (first two) are IbmAssumptions?, that is just assumptions made by IBM. IBM Cultural Assumptions would be those that followed or were influenced by the particular culture of IBM. The third and fourth ones do seem to be cultural.

I'm not sure I agree. In the first case, IBM's assumption lead to their efforts to create any number of work-arounds (such as RPG and MarkIV) that were supposed to let users code their own information requests. Inevitably, this caused ripples in the User communities that tried to use these languages. There was also an IBM Cultural assumption that most people were actually Coders rather than Programmers. One test I use to distinguish the two is asking someone to compute the sum of a series of integers. Coders that grew up in the IBM world, will generally start with a DO loop. Programmers, especially those with a Unix background, will program the appropriate version of the formula. (I know... this is an gross generalization, but it has produced some interesting insights over the decades.) Finally, I did not accept the implicit invitation to relocate the two initial responses, but only because I respect the view that they indeed be in need of it but, being unsure, deferred the act pending clarification.

I see that IBM still likes to use their own terminology for things. For instance, it's not a "motherboard"; it's a "planar" or "system planar". I wonder if it's still "hardfile" instead of "hard drive" or "hard disk".