I recently finished reading Lou Gerstner's Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround, which is his account of the years that he spent at IBM. I worked at IBM during the Gerstner years, albeit in a strange sort of way - the IBM Cupertino lab was actually the remnants of the Taligent crew, and we were given more latitude than your typical IBM facilty. Gerstner's book revealed a few things about IBM (it's like learning about a country) that helped explain some things that I observed during my tenure. I definitely agreed with his point that the IBM culture is a big deal. The difference in the amount of cultural change in different parts of the company was evident depending on which lab you were dealing with.

I had some formative career experiences while at IBM, and I look favorably upon the company because those experiences were instrumental in my getting involved with open source, XML, and Java. While the company is far from perfect, I do feel that I got at least as much from IBM as IBM got from me, so it is easy for me to be positive about the company. I was definitely a beneficiary of some of the changes that Gerstner instituted.