The Misfit Who Built the Ibm Pc
highlights
Estridge was hugely charismatic, although his personal magnetism was drawn from a different source than that of Steve Jobs at Apple or Adam Osborne at Osborne Computing. They were men who sold their own visions. They could create “a reality distortion field” around themselves (a term coined by Apple’s Bud Tribble about Jobs). They could convince you of the value of their ideas and inspire you to give everything in their service.
Estridge was the polar opposite. He listened and supported. His role was to set objectives and provide people with the resources or political cover they needed. This approach inspired a different kind of loyalty from those who worked for him, but it was just as fierce. And it delivered results.
Sydnes, for example, recognized that competing for the home computer market meant going up against Atari and Commodore, and facing off against sharp operators like Commodore’s ruthless founder, Jack Tramiel. In order to beat the master of bargain-basement computing, IBM would have to sink down to Tramiel’s level and sell machines in the kind of discount electronics chains that IBM had always shunned. Estridge, too distant from the minutiae of the project to understand this, vetoed Sydnes’s plans.