Secret of the Blue Binder - II

The curious Rahil approached CEO afterwards and asked him about the blue binder. CEO smiled and told him that during his school days, one of his teacher helped him develop some basic skills. All students had been focusing on homework completion, notebook organization, and planning for long-term assignments. Students who sometimes struggle in school may have difficulties in these areas. For example, a student may be forgetting to write down assignments in class or a student may complete homework but not put it in his or her school bag before going to school.

Binder organization and planning had helped him a lot. One thing that worked for him was color coding of the binders. He told he learned essentially then was taking larger projects and long-term assignments and breaking them down into more easily doable chunks. This also helped in estimating time for completion, sticking to completion schedules, adjusting completion schedules and benchmarking. When report card came out that year, his teacher asked him to reflect on what he did well and what areas needed to target for improvement. CEO told Rahil that being specific, building on successes and backing it up with the structure supported him to keep moving in the right direction towards greater academic success.

Then with a serious voice he told Rahil that do you know How Standardization Affects Competition and Innovation. He told that there is a success story behind the use of blue binder in his organization. The success of his blue binder is similar to other stories of standardization: the evolution of the personal computer industry, local area networking and the Internet revolution.

Then he told Rahil, the story of IBM Personal Computers. Microcomputers existed prior to the release of the IBM PC. So what was it about the initial IBM PC that made it become a de facto standard that served as the basis for the WINTEL (Microsoft Windows running on an Intel or Intel compatible microprocessor) standard still in use today?

There was nothing spectacular about the IBM PC. It was priced higher than other products from Apple and the various manufactures of Z-80 based CP/M computers. Although sporting a "16 bit" microprocessor, the first versions were slower in processing than the 8-bit Z-80 computers. The operating system provided with the IBM PC was a hastily assembled and feature-lacking operating system known as DOS developed by Microsoft.

One clear reason for the success of the IBM PC was that IBM developed it. IBM was the largest computer company in the world at that time. IBM's introduction overnight legitimized a market trend.

The other reason usually discussed was the fact that IBM chose to fully publish the specifications to the hardware and the firmware of the PC. The blue colored binder that contained the IBM Technical Specification became the blue print for a multitude of small startup companies and traditional competitors of IBM. IBM created the first open source product, the IBM PC. Further fueling this openness was the wily negotiating done by Bill Gates and Microsoft. Microsoft convinced IBM to permit them to sell a version of the PC-DOS operating system to other manufacturers, thus creating an overnight de facto standard operating system.

The last reason was market timing. IBM saw the threat caused by the microprocessor and enabling applications, such as word processing and spreadsheets and reacted by embracing the marketplace instead of trying to fight it.

CEO told Rahil that he cannot tell other specific issues and incident about his own organization but he told Rahil to draw an analogy from the story to understand why he was so particular about the blue binder.