Thomas Watson, the legendary IBM CEO, is often misquoted as saying, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” The true story is that he went out to talk to 20 customers, hoping to sell five IBM 701 computers, and ended up with 18 orders. Of course, today, computer sales are measured in the hundreds of millions.
We are currently in the “loving the thought of getting 18 orders after expecting five” stage of software. We are just getting started.
Mr. Watson probably couldn’t envision everyone walking around with a computer in their pocket that is a 100 million times more powerful than that IBM 701. And though I’m going to try, I’ll certainly come up way short of imagining a volume of software output that is eight orders of magnitude beyond what we are producing today.
Ready for takeoff
The first chunk of this blitz will be software that looks familiar and isn’t that surprising. It will be the software sitting in our backlogs — things we’ve wanted to do for years but haven’t had the time for. All software development houses have these projects, and now they will get done. This software will be an expansion of the software we currently have.
