Portfolio
The IBM Effect
Source: DATA BASED ADVISOR Published: Mar 1990
George Schussel talks about the important impact that IBM has on computing standards in this in-depth cover story article. The article points how standards set by IBM have an influence far beyond IBM customers. And the most important standards are said to be those in software, as IBM is presented as a company more dominant in software than in hardware.
A few comments from that article follow:
IBM pays a lot of attention to software because: 1) software drives the sale of hardware, and 2) software has a higher growth rate than hardware. IBM‘s success in the software arena has a powerful impact on all users of PCs-whether or not the brand name on the console is IBM.
For both PC and mainframe users, one of the most important emerging standards is the SQL database language. Although a number of different programming languages for implementing the relational model were developed in the 1970s and early 1980s, the IBM implementation, SQL, became the standard. This happened even though most relational database management system (DBMS) experts severely criticized SQL’s technical shortcomings in presentations and papers through much of the 1980s. SQL was adopted-as you’ll see-for two reasons: political expediency and recognition that any other DBMS language wouldn’t be supported by IBM-and thus couldn’t become a widely used standard.
