AI PCs Without GPUs, NVIDIA’s Autonomous Push, and the Legacy of Lou Gerstner | TSG Ep. 994

Hey, everyone. Are we about to fall in love with our cars again? Maybe if they're AI cars, you're watching Text on Gang.

Um, for those of you watching live, and I hope you are watching this live, this is our second day experimenting with live text on gangs. So upfront, let me apologize in case anything doesn't go exactly as we, we hope it would, but that, that is the nature of live tv. Um, we have a great gang.

It's, it's kind of our usual. So this, you may know this as our Wednesday gang because we used to record it on Tuesday and play it on Wednesday, but truth be told, in my mind, it was always our Tuesday gang. Anyway.

So let me introduce you to our Tuesday gang. Uh, their first, well, Mitchell's been here yesterday, but their first appearance is for the new year. We've got, uh, Dan O'Brien.

Dan o looks like he's back home in, in, uh, I'm gonna say it's Chile, Chile, Boston, Dan, happy New Year. Happy New Year, Alan. And we've got also up, up north, well, I guess we got a lot of Northerners here.

We have Kate Scarsella. Kate, happy New Year to you. Happy even further up north, though, actually New Hampshire may be further north than where Chris is, right?

But North nonetheless. Chris blast. Chris, happy New Year, my friend.

Happy New Year. Good to see you. And then Colorado's, well, it's not really north, but he's high.

Um, always our Fred, Mitch, Ashley, Mitch, happy New Year. And of course, Mike Fazar gang. Welcome, Mike.

Let's kick today's, uh, segments off. The first one involves a love affair with cars. That's a long American tradition.

Well, these are AI cars. Maybe it's a little different. Well, the, the CES show is this week, and as usual, they're talking a lot about cars.

And, uh, Nvidia kind of took center stage this year and talked about a platform called, I think if I get this right, alpha Mayo or something close to that. And they were talking about that alongside robotics and the fact that they're got a new chip called Vera Rubbin in production. But alongside them, SoundHound was talking about how there's gonna be a new AI interface into your cars.

And we might have AI agents, and this is how we're gonna interact with our cars. And once again, we're kinda reinventing the driving experience and NVIDIA's promising us in a bullwinkle moment this time, for sure, we'll get autonomous vehicles absolutely correct, because, well, these systems will be able to recognize anomalies. So for example, if there's a ball bouncing down the street, the system will correlate that to the fact that there's probably a child somewhere nearby.

And that's quite something that you, you can't quite do with existing AI systems. Chris, what's your take on what's going on here? Different kind of driving experience.

It might take a little while before it shows up in a showroom, but what do you think? It's, you know, it's interesting that this is a sort of a new year episode and a year ago, you know, I was on board, you know, mark Twain, Sam Clemens at Allen, you've seen those boats, right? Mm-hmm.

Electric. Mm-hmm. Autonomous, you know, cybernetic vessels.

Yeah. Probably in Boca Raton. I was finishing up the 5,000 miles of sail a boat down the, the coast of the time.

And we had on, on the show we were talking about htic ai. So it, in my mind, it was early, early last year, we started talking about age, and now we're talking about age AI in autonomous vehicles. So it's, it's not all that new.

And, and in the B box coming up next, we're talking about lower, lower CPU u GPUs, uh, lower CPU uhis. And these things were all just coming together so short. Yes.

I like the way you introed it, Alan. We're gonna fall in love with our cars. We already do.

You know, it's a high trust environment. Literally, you're inside is moving across the landscape. It's gonna exercise a lot of the topics that a lot of us have been, you know, talking about and engineering around for the last year.

So how can we trust this? Well, we're going to have to because they're cars and we already have to, and like everything else, we're approaching limits, you know, the existing ways of doing things are getting fragile. So I'll, I'll it, I, I think that my net net is that I'm repeating myself saying this because we've been coming down this path for a while.

And this just a perfect example. I'm not entirely sure I'm gonna fall in love with my car again though, because I'm not really doing much inside my car anymore, other than maybe reading a book or watching a movie or whatever else is gonna be happening because, well, it's all autonomous. So at the end of the day, I might be less engaged with my vehicle and it's certainly not gonna be, you know, some people say you are what you drive.

Maybe I'm not anymore. Maybe it's just this transportation vehicle. Alan, I know that's heresy where you come from, but what do you think, Well, let me, let me, let me pull the gang real quick.

How many of you have some kind of autonomous capability in your cars right now? Anyone? Low level, right?

I mean, you know, the, the auto stop detection, you know, in adaptive cruise control, right? You were talking like L one, L two, low parking, You know, that kind of thing. Yeah.

Yeah. So, so I have in, well, truth be told, it's my wife's, but Dan, you've been in the vehicle with me. The ix Hmm.

That if you go on the highway, it does, it does, it does do autonomous, I forget what they call it, but you press a button and it keeps you in your lane, it slows up, speeds up based upon traffic. It could change lane if you put your signal on. Let me, Dan, even the limited stuff you have in your car, do you trust it?

I don't think it's something you rely on. It's something where sometimes, you know, an automatic braking thing will kick in a second before I was gonna break. Right.

You know, Massachusetts driver here. So, you know, I I'm probably a little more aggressive than the, uh, the autonomous machine at this point. But, uh, yeah.

You know, I can say, you know, it's, it's, it's probably, it know, save me once or twice in terms of, you know, a fender bender or, you know, having to swerve back into my lane. 'cause uh, I didn't see a car in the blind spot or something. Uh, Yeah, no, I Think the experience in the car is gonna go kind of the way of the bus, the train the plane, right?

You know, think about all these transportation, you know, kind of mediums that we have where you're kind of not in control of driving the machine. Right. You know, what do we do in those scenarios?

It feels like that's a lot of what we'll do in the car. Um, maybe we'll get more creative. Um, it's maybe more a personal experience.

You know, you're not in a, you know, kind of communal, you know, uh, you know, group transportation set up. But, um, to me that's where the experience kind of goes here. What exactly are you getting at there, Dan?

I don't know. I wasn't getting at anything on, maybe If we can't do it in a communal experience we're doing privately, I think you're sending that, uh, we're all probably just looking at our phones while we're in a car too. Like, no, but do you really need your phone if you have a good screen?

Well, true, but I Don't know if we can separate ourselves From the phone, you know, and I, I think that's this thing with the SoundHound piece of this, and, and some of it is once we get over the trust factor of turning the driving over to the machine, if you will, right? Like, okay, I trusted it. It's not gonna kill me.

Um, and, and that not gonna be an easy thing to get over. But, um, even if you've ever driven in a Waymo, how many of you can relax in a Waymo, right? That people out here live.

Uh, and, and you know, the nice thing about live, if you're watching this on LinkedIn or something, comment ahead. Tell us what your experience Is. So, so to your point about that though, and I was calculating that in my head the other day.

So I drove from New York to Newark and I went to see the New York Sirens, which is a professional women's hockey team. And I was figuring out the driving there, and I was like, you know, 15 to 20% of the people who are on the road with me are just flat out idiots and more dangerous than a machine. So That's in New York, not Florida, where, yeah.

You know, what I wonder is that if there's an accident, Ken, who, who gets sued, does the machine get sued if you're in one of these cars? Mm-hmm. The insurance would be different.

Yeah. I mean, Well the insurance goes, I think with the vehicle. Yeah.

But, you know, I wonder if we could transfer the, the, uh, the issue if you get into an accident to a machine, if it's actually autonomous, you know, that Would be, I imagine the world where, you know, the, you know, if you're on a fully autonomous driving, you actually have cheaper insurance than you will on a, a human. I mean, you know, Musk has pulled out a bunch of stats that kind of show that, you know, there's fewer car accidents when you're an FSD versus, you know, just people driving around on themselves, right? The, the biggest problem with the FSDs people drive the other people who do drive, right?

It was all FSDs. We probably would've little to no accidents. I'm Sorry, but isn't this, isn't this the, the ultimate cartoon?

Many, when I was a kid in the early seventies, looking on the future, you know, I, I would say, well, obviously at some point the cars drive themselves and you know, when I ongoing, my kids all don't know this, and the oldest is 30. I've been saying since they were born, at some point we're gonna say, Hey, grandma, grandpa, tell me that story of how you used to pilot a vehicle at 70 miles an hour. You know, inches away.

'cause it's insane. And, and, and Musk is right on this one. The stats are already, you know, self-driving cars are safer than humans, but we don't cross them.

But we literally have military autonomous, uh, uh, uh, artifacts moving around our space now. And we have to develop the trust model. And this is the point.

So it's like so many other things. This has been coming not just for decades, for centuries. We're at this point right now, cars are the perfect example because while the technology is probably better than almost all drivers, now we have to figure out how to trust them real fast the next couple years.

Well, I think that the whole trust issue too, Chris, is really about experience. It's, it's, once you've experienced it, you've done it a couple times, okay, you're getting accustomed to it. This works.

Alright, I'll get onto a bus that maybe doesn't have a bus driver. I'll let the car do these things for me now that I've seen that I can do it. Or I have controls to take over if I need to.

So it's learning, it's learning that through an experience or series of experiences, that's what builds the trust. Whether it's AI and we're developing software using it, or it's autonomous driving. Well, and so much of this is really about ai.

Hold on. One at a time. Dan, you go first then Chris.

No, I was just building on Mitch's point that I think he's right. Right? Like, I think we actually do experience a fair amount of autonomy.

We've just kind of forgotten it and gotten over it, right? I mean, certainly there's a pilot involved in some elements of flying, but a lot of the flight you take across the country is on autopilot, right? Well, so, but we, what Mitch said is, is the key, and this is with AI right now, you know, the state, what we're calling AI and how we're using it, this is the perfect point.

You know, we develop trust over time. I don't trust autonomous cars because I've played to them. Yep.

I'll, you said it exactly right. As I get more experience, I'll trust it more. And we flip the tables on this.

We need to allow our systems to do develop experience as well. And that's the kind of things, you know, we're doing in the world. So we can have some track record in this now that, that, as you let the systems actually have a, a memory effective for the purpose, you can have systems develop trust.

So this is cars and humans is this precursive thing that, like I say, we we're looping in this right now 'cause the cars are coming out that are safer than we are, but we don't trust 'em and we're gonna have to, So here's what I wanna see. If I wanna have trust though, I wanna, I wanna label on the car that tells me as another driver that that thing is autonomous. And then eventually probably I wanted a label on the car that tells me human's driving it when there's more autonomous vehicles than there are human driven vehicles.

Well, I that on my boat, for instance, because you know this, right? So a lot of boats have autopilot or, you know, heading and stuff like that. And if you, if, if the boat's in front of you on the back, they usually have like an LED uh, light that is blinking in some pattern that shows the boat's in auto and, and it helps.

But, you know, I, we'll get over the tru thing. I I wanna kind move to another piece of this segment, but before I do, there will be no shortage of smart people who come up with brilliant ideas on how to fill our time up in these vehicles while it's driving itself. Right?

Whether it's shopping, communicating, educating, or even massages or something. Right? Uh, on your seats.

They, they'll, they'll, we will, nature pours a vacuum. We'll figure out what to do at that time. But Mike, there was also a, a, like a, uh, CES part of this, the CES astronaut robotics that I don't want to ignore, right?

I, I saw before the holidays, uh, it was I think a show in China with some amazing Chinese robotics. We, we have some good robotics companies here in the US as well, right? Tesla being one of 'em.

Uh, uh, figure being another Boston Dynamics. Another thi this is, this is going to be an age of robotics. And I, I, you know, I'm like a little boy watching, watching these kinds of announcements.

The car is just a robot at this point, but it's a type of robot. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Definitely. Yeah. I feel like if we look at the kind of autonomous driving maturity curve, that probably gives us a pretty good sense as to how robotics plays out.

Maybe robotics moves a little bit faster, you know, off of some of those learnings, but there's a lot of principles that can be, you know, kind of fully carried over there. Absolutely. I, I worked with, um, with, uh, car company in Detroit, and one of the things that they're predicting is that we won't be buying cars anymore.

It's actually just gonna be one big service, um, cars as a service. So it's, uh, interesting to see where this goes. It's, I'd love with it then, if it's a service.

'cause then I'm just gonna call 'em up and say, you know, I need a, uh, a, a a small truck today, and then tomorrow I want something really fast, right? Yeah. Then I'll rent our garages to them to have those place to house all those cars.

You know, that's kind of the Uber model. I remember when, you know, when Uber first started, my friend Brad was early money in Uber, and Mitch Raj was as well. And, uh, that was the model you had.

Mm-hmm. You know, originally they were thinking autonomous driving was gonna be a lot sooner, and Yeah. And they were going to get rid of the drivers, basically, and have an Uber fleet.

Um, that would take you everywhere. Anyway, hey, we've gotta move on to our next, uh, segment. And it's kind of related.

It's still around autonomy and ai, but we're talking about a i PCs, you know, a lot of people kind of chuckle when they hear about aip cs, I, I admit aip CS were a big story last year, but a little short on what, what, what was the beef in there, right? Where was the beef? But maybe the, we are making some progress on this one.

Mike, what do we have? Well, HP was kind of banging the drum for this the most at the show, but they were talking about a new series of, uh, notebooks that they're coming out with that are based on AI accelerator processors and CPUs. The AI accelerators are from companies like Qualcom and Intel and A MD, but the one thing that was missing was A GPU for these things.

And what they're saying is that for a certain level of performance, at least I can run some of these models locally. If I'm a developer or a data scientist, and I don't need to maybe invoke as many cloud resources to do that, and I can lower the total cost of building AI applications. Dan O'Brien, I know if RUM has a report on this topic and expects that IPCs in the next few years will become more dominant, but what's your take on where are we on this adventure?

Yeah, listen, I, I think the, you know, similar to the last segment, we're kind of in the stays of we're planning for the eventuality, right? Like, this is where it's going. And I think, you know, as you look at PC replacement cycles, you know, anywhere, two years probably on the short end, five years on the longer side, you know, people that are buying PCs today are, are really gearing towards the AI pc.

I mean, I think we see about 88% purchase intent for AI PCs as we, uh, you know, interview enterprise decision makers in the future room research. But, um, you know, I, I think as AI becomes more personal, we're gonna see it and really move to the edge. And, you know, for a lot of the workforce that's gonna be, you know, really at the PC side of things, I think you'll see a kind of typical tiering that you see, you know, in the consumer electronics space, the PC space where, you know, at the high end, you'll probably still have a GPU, um, you know, think about, you know, coding laptops that, uh, developers are using where enterprises want to use, you know, fine tuned, you know, kinda local models, uh, for their development efforts.

And then, you know, the kind of more, you know, general purpose worker, you know, probably less compute intensive tasks happening on their, their laptop, you know, the way that we've gotten these models, uh, you know, these small models quantize down, you know, you really don't need all of that compute power that a, a full on Nvidia GPU brings, you know, Qualcomm, Intel, A and d, um, you know, many others are, are gonna be kind of good enough at the, you know, mid-range and lower end of the portfolios. Mm-hmm. You know, let me make a cheap, just one cheap plug real quick.

I had a great discussion on this with Nick. Patience, one of the FU research, uh, team leads the AI research team at FU group. And, uh, this is a, a session in our Predict 2026 show coming next week, Feb, uh, January 15th.

com, click the Predict 2026 and register. Nick, Nick, I believe kinda led some of the research here and has some great thoughts on, not just on IPCs, but let's call it AI on the Edge and everything else, right? And, um, it, it's great session, don't miss it.

Along with that, we have all of, almost all of the futur and research analysts doing sessions at Predict and each in their own specialty. com. Sorry for the cheap commercial plug, but go ahead, Mitch.

No, I, it's, um, it's interesting. I think everybody expected all of a sudden we were gonna flip over and everything was gonna be an a i PC in 2025, and just the buying cycles, you know, the, the life cycle of how long PCs last within the enterprise and the planning they do for that turnover. But that's very much the data.

You know, both Nick and also Olivier, uh, brancher, who heads up the, uh, kind of PC hardware part of our analyst, um, practice, um, has some really good insights. There's a report that has that staff that Dan was quoting around 88%, uh, planning on including AI as a major factor in their PC purchases over the next two to five years. So it, it's there, and I think most of us are thinking it's, yeah, I don't need the AI data center of the world.

I need something that's doing more inferencing that agents can use to process, uh, software can run on my locally, I can run models. We see a lot of companies that now, or model makers making versions that you can run locally with, you know, llama, but also even that are optimized just to run locally on the device. Same thing's gonna happen or is happening on our phones, uh, doing that there as well.

So I think we're gonna live in a world where AI can run in a lot of places. Maybe it's gonna run on our TV someday. We'll see.

So I world, we live in that world already, right? And I think this is a, a classic example of a huge sort of endemic wave. And we're, we're talking about the enthusiast.

I mean, if you are an AI enthusiast and you say, okay, I want do coding on my PC and I wanna do lots of graphic development. That's, that's what all our, our narrative is about. But there are infinitely more retail locations.

I mean, we're, we're running a lot of AI right now, not on, just on CPUs, old CPUs, because that's perfectly fine for most applications. So, and this is a iterative theme on our, our weekly conversation here. We sit here and talk about, you know, how we need, you know, a a hundred million dollars worth of GPUs to do our thing, but almost everyone on earth uses information systems, isn't us.

They're using systems that, that the capabilities currently available are perfectly fine for in, in fact, they're fantastic. So it's so yes on this, will we have more, you know, AI built brand new hardware, PCs for first world top end applications? Absolutely.

We'll also see all of this AI moving into existing infrastructure where it already works perfectly fine. I'm pleased to see that the laws of physics have not been suspended, and the last time I checked things that run locally run faster, and if I gotta go across a network, there's more latency. So this is pretty awesome to me.

Yeah, Mike, I totally agree. And it also offers some privacy, right? That we still freely give up personally from a cybersecurity perspective.

I like the idea of running locally. So, So I, I have a confession. I, it wasn't my Nick patience, uh, session, it was Olivier session.

Mitch, I'm glad you brought that up, but he's also on Predict 2026. So that's you, you're gonna get it, you're gonna get more for your money there. Um, and Olivier did do some great research there, but guys, I think we're missing the story here.

The story isn't that we're gonna be using more AI enabled PCs or AI enabled devices. The story is we're gonna be able to do that without having expensive GPUs in them. And it goes back to something that we talked about at yesterday's show about we're doing more inferencing than training.

And for a lot of this inference stuff, and, and you know, the, the mundane, if you will, uses of what we're gonna do with our ai, we don't necessarily need those high-end GPUs. Yes, there'll be some corner cases, right? Where we used to have scientific calculators instead of regular calculators if, if you're of an age, but for the most part, you don't need the GPU to do a lot of this kind of work.

And, and I think that's a good thing. Yeah. And to Dan's point, there are gonna be smaller models that are gonna run locally that are gonna be personalized to you, and it just won't be developers and data scientists.

I think ultimately many end users are gonna have their own little personal models that run locally and they will interact with other models in the cloud, and the whole thing becomes a whole lot more distributed. Oh yeah, okay. I think as AI gets cheaper, we're gonna see proliferation continue to expand, right?

So all this is a good thing in my mind in that the more that you don't need to spend up to a certain price point to get AI locally, the more people will be able to afford that and adopt that. Um, you know, I also think that, you know, if you're a PC maker, how many models in your lineup are gonna be not compatible with an AI world going forward, right? I mean, to me, this is news.

Yes. But, you know, I don't see the P-C-O-E-M space filling their lineup with a lot of PCs that can't handle AI locally over time. So I think we're at the point now where, you know, last year a lot of the portfolio transitioned over this year even more, you know, as we get two, three years out, you know, this, this becomes a standard feature in my mind versus a differentiated feature.

Well, Other, I Don't even know if I'd called it a feature. I think it's just that's how PCs are, right? I, us For doing business just built in.

So what, did you buy a PC today that didn't have an AI accelerator in it? Yes. Yes.

It, again, everything's an AI accelerator. It depends what you mean. Like our last segment, we're talking about cars, right?

And this is the, it's less about, you know, so local sovereign systems. I want my car not to be cloud enabled. You know, I will trust it based on its the sensors arrangements and so forth that I can understand myself.

But, you know, and this, you know, Kate, Kate, your comment, right? You know, so I, I'm running a small business and I want my data to stay local, and I want an ai, you know, I want some sort of semantic system to navigate that. And that's all that really matters to me.

I don't need huge systems for that, and I don't want to spread that information around. I don't want to trust my business continuity or my operation haven't held me or my ve vehicle that I'm in, you know, to need that con we're that connection and it's just not really necessary. We're, we're over.

And don't get me wrong, I'm a geek. I love all the super tech, but you can make it really small. It just works without a lot of complexity.

We talk about in shows like this And, and doesn't it go along the same lines of what we spoke about a lot last year about these huge data centers that are being built for something that we don't even know yet. If, I mean, we're building for today, what, what is gonna be happening tomorrow? And I think in fact tomorrow, you know, we may actually require less, not more.

So, you know, I, and, and I think this is the prime example of, of, of what we talked about last year. You know, Skynet has to have somewhere to run Kate. So Yeah, I was talking to JLL about that very issue though yesterday.

And, um, they were pointing out that while they think that there's gonna be more capacity than ever, they did note that funding for data centers is under pressure now. Because people are starting to ask that question about, well, do we have enough capacity? And will we get the return on investment on that?

Right? And we have to ask that because I, I really do believe that we have not seen yet this full capacity of what it has to offer. And I, I think we're building way, way too much.

And, you know, You know, this is going back to last year, actually last month, uh, I-B-M-C-E-O, Alvin Krishna, right, came out. We, we did a show on this. I think I did a show he says on this, on the, the economics of, of AI factories, of AI data centers and, you know, including power and cooling and everything else.

But speaking of IBM CEOs, I wanted to spend a little time today, uh, I acknowledging the passing of Lou Gerner, who really kind of changed the very fabric of Big Blue. We've got a few ex IBMers on our panel today, Dan and, and Kate, I believe both of you. I don't know if either one of you were there when Lou was there.

Yeah, Kate, you were. I was, yeah. And, uh, hey, I, I have the, uh, the book that came out, um, that he wrote who says Elephants Can't Dance.

And and I joined in, um, 1998. One of the things that I believe that was extremely controversial, uh, at the time was, and, and even now if you hear it, it almost sounds like crazy. The last thing IBM needs right now is vision.

And when you think about that, it's like he was so right. It was, it wasn't vision, it was the execution failure that came into, into play with this. So IBM already had plenty, plenty of vision bold strategies, future roadmaps and, and really grand plans.

But what it lacked was operational discipline. And so cost control, accountability, um, customer focus and the ability to execute what was already there. So, um, yeah, his insight was phenomenal into services and, and customer services.

And he, he turned around a, a company and he saw that it, we needed to, you know, stabilize, um, a cultural change, which was, you know, huge. And, and I was there, you know, when you, Hey, I was there with OS two War and Lotus, and then I was there with, with Tivoli, and then I was there, um, you know, I was there for, for over 20 years and, you know, when they bought, um, internet security systems and mm-hmm. You saw a big difference on, um, how you can't have at the time product and services in the same group competing because it basically, you know, one was gonna win out over the other and services, you know, one, and I personally saw really good products die.

In fact, we used to call it, um, the IBM, um, or the, the Project Witness, uh, protection program, right? Because really phenomenal products, people from a security perspective. And you saw, um, his vision continue, um, through the, through the next leaders that would come along and, and make some really tough decisions and, and, you know, um, get rid of, not get rid of Tivoli.

But yeah, I mean, they basically got rid of the Tivoli brand and went into IBM security systems and, you know, so phenomenal leadership that continued even after he left. And that's true leadership. I remember two things when I was at Computer World and Infra World during his years there and, and when he was running IBM and, and the two things that I remember him doing, one was kind of, everybody kind of remembers, but the IBM brand became about the people, right?

It was the expertise of IBM and it was a shift away from IBM, the product company more towards IBM, you know, do business with us 'cause we have the best and smartest people. And the whole marketing tenor changed. And then the second thing that people don't talk a whole lot about, but I do remember is, you know, IBM quietly began funding all kinds of little open source initiatives.

And they were and heavily into Linux under his watch. And I don't think he necessarily, you know, cared too much about open source of tech, but he recognized that as a way to drive the services opportunity for IBM in a way that allowed them to compete more aggressively with the likes of a Microsoft. And that bonded leaning actually to things like the acquisition of Red Hat.

But Dan, I know you were inside IBM later, but, you know, how much influence does Lou have to this day in the culture of IBM? Yeah, I joined, uh, you know, at the tail end of Ginny Rami's tenure. Um, and it was there mostly under Arvin Krishna.

Um, but you know, you, you would still hear Lou talked about with reverence, you know, the IBM has a, a lot of long time employees that have been there, you know, 15, 20, 25, 30 years. And, you know, you would certainly hear stories from the, the Lou Gerner days. I mean, I think what, what makes IBM special in a lot of ways is its ability to reinvent itself.

Um, you know, I kind of chalk that up mostly to IBM research in my mind, which is kind of the crown jewel and allows them to avoid missing any of these big, um, you know, kind of revolutions in the tech landscape. But, you know, all of those kinda reinventions require, you know, strong and bold leadership and, you know, certainly I think Lou gets a lot of credit, uh, a lot of credit for that much. I, you know, that Arvin I think is getting that now, um, you know, interesting Lou driving the shift a little bit more to services.

You Arvin driving it a little bit more back to product. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head, which is Lou really taught IBM that it can change, that it can reinvent itself. We see it happening right now.

The pivot, the move back to software, back to software development is a big emphasis for them. Um, and they know they've got some catch up to do, but they're tackling it. They're going after it.

You see in products like Project Bob, uh, you know, their own IDE for doing agent development, uh, leveraging, you know, things like the research you talked about. I mean, think about Watson and Watson X and how far that's come along. And that started in the, uh, Gerner era.

So a lot of seeds that were planted, Um, with him. So I think we're gonna see a different looking IBM in what It is. No, what was interesting to me about Lou, though, he's the only IBM outsider to become CEO before it was all IBM people.

And since Lou, it's been all IBM people. So it's an interesting thing that, you know, if you're gonna make a CEO of IBM, you've gotta be there a long time. You know, I, they thought, Yeah, go Ahead.

I'm sorry. No, Kate, you go, They, they thought when Luke came in that he was basically just there to, to watch it die, to slowly die. And he did quite the opposite.

So, You know, I, I think back and, and I'm a child of my times, right? We, I should say that upfront, but there was a, a period of time there in the, in the late eighties and nineties where we saw men for their time, and unfortunately it was men or we, we didn't have many women CEOs back then, right? But there were men for their time who rose to the occasion that saved iconic companies, the Lee Coaches of the world, the Lou Gerner's of the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs coming back to Apple, right?

They, they, they, they really put these companies on their back to a certain extent and, and drag, you know, like, you know that old saying when the footprints in the sand there, there's that whole thing, right? It was, that was when I was carrying you, that's these co these men carried these companies through their lowest periods in some ways and back up, you know, to the incline. Um, I don't know if we'd have an IBM today, frankly, if not for Lou Gerstner, right?

You had, you had antitrust situations going on. They, IBM every division in there was fighting with each other. If you didn't like the price you got from this group, you went to that group.

You know, I remember when we, I sold my first company and I went to work for the company that bought it. And we, we were putting together inter reliant, we were, we were this a big Lotus Notes shop, right? IBM had bought Lotus at the time, and IBM was an investor.

I, I did a $10 million investment with IBM into inter reliant. And, and so we worked really closely at the time was IBM Global Services. Um, and this is when Lou first came in this 98, 99, 2000, and he's changing, he's going to services.

We were so afraid that they weren't gonna let us host notes and, and, and let IB m's sales team sell our hosted notes package. But Lou Lou said, we don't care who's hosting it, right? It, it's about delivering to the customer what they want.

And if you have a good host hosted notes. And at the time, we had built some, look for those of you, you can make fun of notes all you want, but that notes, uh, server was a monster. You can make it do anything.

And we had customized the hell out of it, and we were, we had a whole platform, really a platform that ran on it, and he loved it. And he, he's the one who pushed it through and said, you're gonna sell this. And that.

It, it quickly became 50, 60% of our sales, right? IBM we were a big IBM partner and they made our company and we did the IPO and we did the whole thing. So for that, I'm grateful to him for what he did, and I, you know, it's a huge, huge legacy.

He leaves, I'm sorry to see him pass away. He really looked, go ahead. Go ahead, Chris.

I was just, just gonna say, you know, uh, Allie had touched on it. So in 1990, I was a, a General Electric when Jack Walsh was there, right? And another one, right?

And I was running the video conference center, and I literally, I took the job and we were in the office job. So I gotta wear a tie. We all wore ties, right?

And then I always forget his name, the one of the second in commands came in and he sat there for two days and I ran the conference centers and he interviewed the executives and the people on the shop floor. And I realized we had a story. GE had a story again, right?

We don't wear ties, we get the work done. You know, we actually fired the most, uh, uh, senior person in the plant in South Carolina and implemented the most Germany person's recommendation because it bloody made sense. And I can tell you across the, the company, we suddenly knew who we were.

And with John Chambers of Cisco in 2000, you see these, you know, it's, it's about giving the group a a story, right? Who are we? Why are we here?

You can feel in the room. We all know that, you know, if, if, if the team of the company knows why we're here and what we're doing, you know, you can, you know, current turn, uh, uh, goat milk into the gasoline. And if you don't, you can get work done.

Maybe that's the difference, Okay? I'm always dubious of the great man of history, theory of life where people look back in time and put it on one person. 'cause I always think it's a combination of, uh, events and people and, you know, somebody's gotta be at the front of that parade.

But I always say, you know, it takes more than one person. And I'll also go back to what Alan was just talking about. So yes, you know, IBM m did hosted notes, uh, then Sam Palmisano came along few years later and wound up apologizing to all IBM's channel partners for taking business direct.

And that's just the, the wave of cycle and how things go back and forth. And it's funny, I was trying to explain Lou Gerner's impact to somebody who was in their thirties the other day, and they nodded their heads and they said, you know, that's pretty much how all companies now operate these days. So what was the big deal?

How come they couldn't figure out the fact that they needed to kill products that weren't successful? There you go, Kate, I'll give you a last word. Well, to Mike's point, it's what makes sense.

And it's unfortunate that it takes us, you know, that we look at this, the something that can be so simple and that we just can't wrap our hat heads around it. You know? So good, good for simple.

Keep it simple, right? Isn't that our, the, the logo that, you know, There, there are a few companies out there that need a Lou Gerner, that's for sure. Yeah.

You know, I, I'll throw one last question out at you. Do you think with the, you know, Monday morning quarterback in the lens of history, the current crop of tech CEOs, the, the Jensen Wongs, the, the Sam Altman's, the Elon's, are they in the same category as the Jack Welchs and the Lou Gerner's and the Lee IKit? I heard, well, that's a good point, Chris, but I, I don't see that, and I, I don't see that, those characteristics in this new leadership at all.

So that's, you know, I, I Think the book is, the book is still out on Jensen Wong. We'll see how Nvidia becomes, he may widen up being in that class. Mitch, Dan, I'll give you your chance to, I'll just jump in real quick.

I think, I think we are in an era of a different kind of leader. We're, we're in the, the, uh, influencer, um, kind of accumulating building, building companies in that way. Less about execution, more about vision and, and moving, you know, moving the market.

Um, and that's not to say that some or many of them will be viewed as great leaders. It's about building great companies that are built with great people. And the leaders that do that, again, with whatever method, I think will be the ones that stand out, whether it's Jensen or you can pick any, you know, Musk or any, any of the other tech bros, uh, company leaders that might be possible to look at that in the future.

Dan, you got a last word? Yeah, I'll agree with Mitch a little bit in that I think it's a very different job now, right? You know, it's a lot less about the internal, a lot more about the external.

You're much more the face and the spokesperson of the company. I mean, just think about, you know, how many more different ways we've got to communicate and the frequency at which these leaders are kind of out there for all to see. Um, you know, I, I think it's shifted to a little bit more, you know, kind of external visionary, um, type of role versus so much that kind of internal, you know, manager.

And if I could just add one thing, it, it's a, it's a quote on back of the book that I held up, uh, Gerner says I came to see in my time at IBM. The culture isn't just one aspect of the game. It is the game in the end.

An organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of his people to create value. So to NI's point, you know, it's, it's the organization. So if People, actually, you guys watch, you folks watching this have the last word.

And if you want to comment in on this while we're here, you try to answer it. But even if you comment after, we do have some of our editors and folks coming in and monitoring the comments and answering them, we hope you like this new live format. We're gonna try it again tomorrow.

We'll keep doing it. It'll get better every day, I hope. But that's gonna wrap up today's show.

Mitch, Dan, Kate, Chris, Mike, thank you. Thank you for watching. We hope you like Textron Gang live, and uh, we'll see you tomorrow.

Until then, we do have Textron TV coming on. com. Bye-bye everyone.