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When an IBM salesman saw a coffee cup with the Amdahl Logo at a customers site, he was instructed to cut one million dollar of his price offer. That was the one

When an IBM salesman saw a coffee cup with the Amdahl Logo at a customers site, he was instructed to cut one million dollar of his price offer. That was the one million dollar coffee mug. http://dealwhisperers.blogspot.co.il/2015/07/a-million-dollar-coffee-cup.html http://dealwhisperers.blogspot.co.il/2015/07/a-million-dolla... here is a picture of it http://www.deadprogrammer.com/fud-you http://www.deadprogrammer.com/fud-you

corin_ 11y ago
Amdahl sales people telling customers "this mug will get you a $1m discount if you ask for it" is not the same as IBM instructing sales people to discount $1m if they see the mug. Obviously, knowing that your client is considering a rival company would make you consider dropping your price, but unless you have a better source I'm going to assume it was just nice spin around that fact from Amdahl people, not an actual IBM rule.
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chiph 11y ago
> I casually rested on his desk the brochure for the Y Model car from the dealership next door. I'm so doing that next time I buy a new car.
rdl 11y ago
I wonder what the modern equivalents are. (Also, how to get an Amdahl mug today)
- wmf 11y ago
  I once put a vendor X sticker on my laptop before a sales meeting with vendor Y. It was the only sticker, so they didn't fail to notice it.
- kijiki 11y ago
  We at Cumulus have been told by our customers that having one of our rocket-turtle stickers on their laptop results in a much faster and easier negotiations about discounts with their Cisco sales rep. An Arista sticker probably works too. It is one of the reasons we made the stickers. =)
noonespecial 11y ago
You have to wonder about the management at IBM that made him unhappy enough to leave in the first place. That kind of guy is going to do what he's going to do now matter what. Whether he does it for you or in competition against you is the only question. There are very few lengths management shouldn't have gone to keep a guy like that happy at IBM.
- btilly 11y ago
  He disagreed with their technical staff about how to design a mainframe. The technical staff said that the operating system should run on microcode to abstract away the hardware. That way it would be easier for customers to migrate to new hardware as it became available. And they could easily add a new instruction if they needed to. Gene said that it would be an order of magnitude faster if it ran directly on the hardware, and it wasn't that hard to support that API going forward. Both proved right. Gene built computers that were massively faster than IBM's and perfectly compatible. IBM then added an instruction in micro-code and made all of their software use it. Gene's installed base all crashed on IBM's new code, while IBM's was fine. The US government launched an anti-trust lawsuit, which wound up binding IBM's hands for many years after. IBM mainframes today still run on micro-code. And it still makes them massively slower than they need to be, but with better backwards compatibility. The mainframe world depends on a lot of programs from the 1960s and 1970s that runs, unchanged, today. Everyone else is using native instructions and runs faster.
  - theoh 11y ago
    A good opportunity to mention the Popek-Goldberg criteria. If Amdahl's machines had been able to efficiently trap on the use of the new instruction (and execute a workaround using their existing instruction set) they might have been OK. Depends what the instruction was used for. Popek-Goldberg discusses the case where you want to virtualise your hardware: instruction set design becomes really important.
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corin_ 11y ago

Amdahl sales people telling customers "this mug will get you a $1m discount if you ask for it" is not the same as IBM instructing sales people to discount $1m if they see the mug. Obviously, knowing that your client is considering a rival company would make you consider dropping your price, but unless you have a better source I'm going to assume it was just nice spin around that fact from Amdahl people, not an actual IBM rule.

deleted 11y ago
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chiph 11y ago

> I casually rested on his desk the brochure for the Y Model car from the dealership next door. I'm so doing that next time I buy a new car.

rdl 11y ago

I wonder what the modern equivalents are. (Also, how to get an Amdahl mug today)

wmf 11y ago
I once put a vendor X sticker on my laptop before a sales meeting with vendor Y. It was the only sticker, so they didn't fail to notice it.
kijiki 11y ago
We at Cumulus have been told by our customers that having one of our rocket-turtle stickers on their laptop results in a much faster and easier negotiations about discounts with their Cisco sales rep. An Arista sticker probably works too. It is one of the reasons we made the stickers. =)

noonespecial 11y ago

You have to wonder about the management at IBM that made him unhappy enough to leave in the first place. That kind of guy is going to do what he's going to do now matter what. Whether he does it for you or in competition against you is the only question. There are very few lengths management shouldn't have gone to keep a guy like that happy at IBM.

btilly 11y ago
He disagreed with their technical staff about how to design a mainframe. The technical staff said that the operating system should run on microcode to abstract away the hardware. That way it would be easier for customers to migrate to new hardware as it became available. And they could easily add a new instruction if they needed to. Gene said that it would be an order of magnitude faster if it ran directly on the hardware, and it wasn't that hard to support that API going forward. Both proved right. Gene built computers that were massively faster than IBM's and perfectly compatible. IBM then added an instruction in micro-code and made all of their software use it. Gene's installed base all crashed on IBM's new code, while IBM's was fine. The US government launched an anti-trust lawsuit, which wound up binding IBM's hands for many years after. IBM mainframes today still run on micro-code. And it still makes them massively slower than they need to be, but with better backwards compatibility. The mainframe world depends on a lot of programs from the 1960s and 1970s that runs, unchanged, today. Everyone else is using native instructions and runs faster.
- theoh 11y ago
  A good opportunity to mention the Popek-Goldberg criteria. If Amdahl's machines had been able to efficiently trap on the use of the new instruction (and execute a workaround using their existing instruction set) they might have been OK. Depends what the instruction was used for. Popek-Goldberg discusses the case where you want to virtualise your hardware: instruction set design becomes really important.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- 11y ago