August 27th, 2024

The Microsoft/IBM joint development was built on mutual respect, wait, is respect the right word?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

I’ve noted in the past that Microsoft and IBM collaborated on a project known as OS/2. The Microsofties viewed the IBM engineers as mired in corporate policy, whereas the IBM engineers viewed their Microsoft counterparts as a bunch of undisciplined hackers.

At a team meeting in Redmond, Steve Ballmer (then head of the Platform division) recognized one of my colleagues in the back of the room¹ who had previously worked as an intern at IBM. He asked, “You used to work at IBM, right? What do they think of us?”

My colleague replied, “They hate us just as much as we hate them.”

¹ Steve Ballmer is well-known for his ability to remember the names and personal details of people he has met, even if only briefly.

Category
Old New Thing
Topics
History

Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

3 comments

Discussion is closed. Login to edit/delete existing comments.

Newest
Newest Popular Oldest
  • sechelé delaruse

    yes i see.

    one should venture here that when os/2 came out it made the cover of the byte magazine, and one could also venture here that some of us looked up from our sun (well the university's sun) workstations and realized that there were good reasons for this

    such as,
    - the growing market concensus of a need to move desktop ui away from singleton application display contexts
    - the admission that the x86 segmented mode had to be deprecated at the os layer in favor of as flat an address space as possible, with as much memory as...

    Read more
  • Rez Zircon

    Way back before electricity, the MSDOS5 (almost 6) source got leaked. It made entertaining reading… there are a lot of comments on the, uh, personal worth of IBM’s coders, easily found by searching for profanity.

  • Don Hacherl

    I remember during the OS/2 project that IBM performed a "vendor relations survey" about its relationship with Microsoft. The Microsoft engineers basically used every known synonym for "incompetent" to describe their views of the IBM engineers they dealt with, while the IBM engineers' main complaint was the the Microsofties were "arrogant". Those results came back to us at MS and the common response was "yeah, ok, I'll concede to arrogance, but you guys are still incompetent".

    And you're underselling SteveB's awe inspiring memory. When a co-worker asked Steve to guess my (deceptive looking) age he immediately gave the...

    Read more

Read next