THe IBM way

Sales were booming. at the
beginning of the new decade,
the office Products division
was selling an average of 17
typewriters a day
and the data Processing
department an average of two
S/34 systems per month.
Alfred Yim, Paul Shik and Nancy Ku receive first-day
orders for the IBM Electronic Typewriters, 1980
4 6 • t h E i b m w a y
75, a low-end word processor that introduced a
new era of word processing. “Both price-wise and
performance-wise, the ‘75’ was a multi-functional
and powerful typewriter for local business firms,”
said Michael Tang, who was Office Products mar-
keting manager at the time.
Sales were booming. At the beginning of the
new decade, the Office Products Division was
selling an average of 17 typewriters a day and the
Data Processing Department an average of two
System/34 (S/34) systems per month. The com-
pany also continued to expand its market share in
the manufacturing, educational, medical and com-
mercial sectors.
IBM was still facing keen competition in the
marketplace, particularly for smaller data pro-
cessing and word processing machines. And so
in 1981, the company embarked on an extensive
reorganization, which was to prove far-sighted.
Essentially, it pulled the company’s focus squarely
towards the understanding that concerted mar-
keting and service strategies were the key to suc-
cess in selling technology. The reorganization also
brought the customer engineering and marketing
functions closer together.
Creative marketing techniques began to be
introduced. These may seem standard now, but at
the time, schemes like the “special bids” strategy
typified IBM’s out-of-the-box thinking: IBM sales-
persons were encouraged to identify customer
needs and recommend specially tailored packages
which fit their requirements exactly, rather than
trying to sell a “one-size-fits-all” approach, which
was prevalent among vendors at the time.
Two examples of the scheme’s success were the
order of more than 50 Displaywriters for Cathay
Pacific Airways – IBM’s first large scale office
automation order involving host-linked products
– and an order to supply 20 Personal Computers
to the University-Polytechnic Computer Center,
IBM’s first multiple order used mainly for medical