John Bevis, from the University of Florida, and current president of SHARE, opened the meeting. John is a heckuva nice guy, but he hasn't exactly mastered the art of speaking in front of a crowd of thousands. He looked distinctly uncomfortable behind the teleprompters, and he sort of shifted his gaze from one to the other by turning his whole body while he spoke. Sort of like Al Gore on one of his especially wooden days.
The "Best Session" awards were given, and among those were one for Cheryl Watson. Cheryl's Quickstart WLM Policy has gotten a lot of attention, and this award was well deserved. Bob Shannon and Carl Youngren received the "President's Award" for their outstanding contribution to the MVS/SCP Project. Only Carl came up to accept the award, and John Bevis quipped that Bob never comes to the General Session. "Let's all congratulate Bob this week when we see him, but don't tell him why", John told the arena audience, drawing a big laugh.
Our featured speaker was John W. Thompson, an IBM General Manager in North American marketing. Thompson is a really smooth speaker; he is well groomed, articulate, and... well, has an air of leadership about him. Not at all like some of the slimy lizards that IBM has paraded in the past. I kind of hope this guy will go farther.
Thompson began by talking about the history of the Disney Brothers animation company. He pointed out that Walt Disney was first successful doing "Oswald the Rabbit" short features. But when the studio was becoming solvent, Walt lost the right to Oswald to a business partner.
Panic ensued: we've lost our star! So Walt Disney took Oswald, shortened and rounded his ears and created Mickey Mouse. Thompson said this was an example of the business changing out of financial necessity. He reached under the podium and pulled out a pair of mouse ears, and put them on, to a roar of approval. "My mom won't believe I'm doing this", he grinned.
Wearing his Mickey hat, Thompson drew a parallel between the Disney company history and the "opportunities" imposed by the emergence of the Internet. Doing business on the Internet is rapidly becoming a financial necessity, and companies that ignore it will be left behind.
The cost per MIPS in 1998 is one percent of what it was in 1990. Home computers have begun to outsell home televisions. Thompson suggested that IBM might have been partially to blame for CBS' failure to attract viewers for the Nagano Olympics. IBM's web site had a total of 650 million hits, three times the number of hits during the Atlanta Olympics. During the women's skating finals, IBM recorded a peak of 103,450 hits per minute.
That peak would have crushed the IBM computers back during the Summer Olympics. "We ate our humble pie in Atlanta", Thompson said, acknowledging the horrible press that IBM got.
He reviewed the success stories of several businesses on the 'net. The first companies there, regardless of their size, are the ones who have generated all the name recognition and gotten the lion's share of the Internet business. He talked about Internet staples such as amazon.com the bookseller, cdnow.com the music retailer, and schwab.com the brokerage firm. Did you know that a full 36% of Schwab trades are done over the Internet?
Thompson paid some lip service to the impending Y2K disaster. At this time, American Express has not issued any cards with expiration dates past 1999; testing showed that too many card readers worldwide couldn't handle them. And KLM is not taking reservations for some countries, and cancelling those flights after 1999 for fear of the failure of the countries' Y2K effort. We're talking some real disaster here.