Michael Stockdell

Event Horizon Michael Stockdell

EVENT HORIZON tells the story of the decline of IBM as the dominant force in the computer industry and how my business career was sucked down with it. IBM's decline was caused by two factors: (1) its obsolete technology based on an "all roads lead to Rome" centralized processing, and (2) the changing computer industry culture where technicians rather than salesmen ruled the roost. I saw this as an opportunity to create a unique kind of consulting practice based on technical specialists who could more quickly replace the mainframe legacy systems than generalist consultants. These insights deeply frightened industry management and eventually led to my being driven out of the industry.