THE GREATEST CAPITALIST WHO EVER LIVED

Comprehensive biography of the tech pioneer who transformed IBM into a digital giant.

As early as 1964, Tom Watson Jr. (1914-1993) was “widely esteemed as the most successful head of a major corporation in mid-twentieth-century America.” He wasn’t the easiest person to get along with, given to excoriating underperformers, but he was also democratically inclined, at a far remove from his father’s aloof demeanor. By McElvenny and Wortman’s account, Watson’s greatest success was developing a computer that, thanks to a relatively simplified operating system, was compatible with other machines, offering “solutions to myriad problems previously beyond calculation, even imagining.” This machine provided an essential underpinning for the modern economy, making possible the use of credit cards, improving inventory management, and eventually forming a network of computers and servers that would become the internet. The authors take numerous detours in this history, with one pressing concern being to exonerate IBM from the charge that it helped the Hitler regime. While technology was provided to the Nazis via a subsidiary organization, Watson’s father, they argue, disengaged from the German state well before the U.S. entered World War II, when Watson Sr. “put IBM and its comprehensive social and business culture in the service of the US and its allies.” IBM would become a linchpin in the Cold War technological economy, with Watson Jr. inaugurating a transformation into the new world of personal computing and, at one point, hiring more than 2,000 programmers to develop software. On that note, the authors let some of the air out of the legend that Bill Gates skunked IBM by developing MS DOS as industry-standard software, noting that IBM would have courted antitrust scrutiny had it required a proprietary system. In a swift-moving narrative, the authors make clear that Watson was a man of parts, one of the prime shapers of the modern technological world.

A readable and revealing work of business and tech history.