There were two things that I could have added to my comment on competitors. One was that the IBM top managers were marketing men with little in-depth experience with computers while I had opted as a senior manager to do systems analysis assigned to Management Services when asked to evaluate the three computer models used to manage Shell in Venezuela. Senior managers were much more valued than programmers in 1961 and became one of the highest paid programmers in the world. My arrival in Management Services was not viewed with pleasure by the director. We had the same job grade but I was a rising star and he wasn’t.
The other was that John Opel and I had something in common — bird watching. It was the fileing of my comment under birds that brought this back to my mind. However the birds that I watched were a different species. I think that I got a lot more fun out of my birds than John did out of his but who knows. It takes a lot of different people to make a world.
