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Source: The Unexpected 53

so few of them are truly compatible with one another, that the whole
field has become chaotic, with service and repairs in shambles. But
this does not seem to bother the customers. On the contrary, in the U.S.
market the personal computers in five short years—from 1979 to
1984—reached the annual sales volume it had taken the “main-
frames” thirty years to reach, that is, $15–$16 billion.
IBM could have been expected to dismiss this development.
Instead, as early as 1977, when personal computer sales worldwide
were still less than $200 million (as against main-frame sales of $7
billion for the same year), IBM set up task forces in competition with
one another to develop personal computers for the company. As a
result, IBM produced its own personal computer in 1980, just when
the market was exploding. Three years later, in 1983, IBM had
become the world’s leading personal computer producer with nearly
as much of a leadership position in the new field as it had in main-
frames. Also in 1983 IBM then introduced its own very small “home
computer,” the “Peanut.”
When I discuss all this with the IBM people, I always ask the same
question: “What explains that IBM, of all people, saw this change as an
opportunity when everybody at IBM was so totally sure that it couldn’t
happen and made no sense?” And I always get the same answer:
“Precisely because we knew that this couldn’t happen, and that it would
make no sense at all, the development came as a profound shock to us.
We realized that everything we’d assumed, everything we were so
absolutely certain of, was suddenly being thrown into a cocked hat, and
that we had to go out and organize ourselves to take advantage of a
development we knew couldn’t happen, but which then did happen.”
The second example is far more mundane. But is it no less instruc-
tive despite its lack of glamour.
The United States has never been a book-buying country, in part
because of the ubiquitous free public library. When TV appeared in the
early fifties and more and more Americans began to spend more and
more of their time in front of the tube—particularly people in their
prime book-reading years, that is, people of high school and college
age—“everyone knew” that book sales would drop drastically. Book
publishers frantically began to diversify into “high-tech media”: educa-
tional movies, or computer programs (in most cases, with total lack of
success). But instead of collapsing, book sales in the United States have
soared since TV first came in. They have grown several times as fast as
every indicator had predicted, whether family incomes, total popula