Behind all the bad jokes about the man that ran the French coal board, Bernard Pache, being appointed to run Groupe Bull SA despite his lack of knowledge or experience of the computer industry lies a serious point. In general, there is no reason for cross-industry management transplants to cause any raised eyebrows, but the computer industry is different in kind from any other in that there is no other capital good that can cost $5m to $10m where you buy it, and for anything from 18 months to five years thereafter, have no idea whether it will handle effectively the task for which it was installed – witness the 10-year saga of Britain’s Drivers & Vehicles Licensing Centre in Swansea. If you buy a German car and are dissatisfied with it, you can buy a Japanese car next time with no residual burden from the mistake you made first time around. If you buy an IBM Corp mainframe and are dissatisfied with it, you can certainly buy a Japanese one next time around – but you are unlikely to be any more satisfied with it than you were with the IBM one, because almost certainly the dissatisfaction was not caused by the hardware but by aspects of the machine over which the Japanese companies have no control. Outsiders can make a success of running computer companies, but they start with a much bigger handicap than they would in any other industry.
