Watson Center

Split into two campuses,one in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., the other 20 minutes away in Hawthorne, N.Y., and cradled in the hills of the Hudson Valley,the Research Center headlines IBM's $6-billion-a-year research and development operation. The center is named after Thomas J. Watson Jr., whose father founded IBM and who eventually took the reins of the company himself from 1956 to 1971. Fortune magazine once referred to Watson Jr. as "the greatest capitalist who ever lived."

As IBM's sales and profits grew through the decades, so did IBM's research efforts.

z One research veteran after another at the Watson Center remember the days of 10-year product development cycles, deep pockets and deep thinking on technology that never made it into products.

And then about 10 years ago IBM hit troubled times. Sales fell, profits disappeared and belts were tightened.

"The early '90s were not a fun time at IBM," recalled David Seeger, senior manager of silicon and processor technologies at the Watson Center. "They were not a fun time at IBM Research."

Louis Gerstner, IBM's current chairman and chief executive, issued a directive in 1993 when he took over the Armonk, N.Y.-based company that R&D would be cut and work would be focused on solving customer problems and developing technologies that made the company money.

While IBM Research has no profit-or-loss statement like traditional product groups, Watson Center engineers and developers are now graded by how much technology gets picked up by its server, software and traditional "brand" units.

But Gerstner also had an agenda to push the envelope of what he called at the time "network-centric computing." He gave speeches where he openly discussed the possibilities of "personal area networks." Gerstner spoke of the company that developed mainframes the size of a city block also developing computers that people could wear.

And last year, IBM demonstrated what it claims is the world's first "wearable PC",a technology it has not yet shipped but which it continues to develop with an eye toward bringing to market. The size of a PalmPilot or Sony Walkman, the wearable PC is a full-blown, Windows 98 PC with a mouse, graphics and video capability and an optical screen that fits on your head and wraps around in the front to offer the ultimate in remote computing.

Developed by a small team led by Russell Budd, a senior engineer for IBM optical systems, the wearable PC ultimately will be aimed at both the consumer market as well as corporate solutions such as manufacturing. There, its application can be used by aircraft repairmen who can bring PC,or network-stored data or videos,into the most cramped conditions.

"If you have a good idea, our management has been very supportive," Budd said.

Support also comes in the form of years of research successes and failures. For example, it took decades of research before IBM made its copper processor technology available commercially. The team that completed work on the technology, now widely believed to be the future standard for microprocessors, drew deeply from the work done at IBM as much as a generation earlier, Seeger said. "If we didn't have that amount of experience, we would not be able to make copper process technology available," he said.

Now, Seeger and his group look to future generations of architecture, including plasma-based processors that could even outstrip the performance of copper.

Richards graduated from the University of Oregon, where he majored in cognitive psychology. He now runs a small team that, among other things, has developed applications used by British supermarket chain Safeway U.K. to provide customers with personal digital assistants that act as high-tech shopping lists. Customers can remotely write shopping lists, dial into Safeway's database, and order their week's groceries.

Safeway, which is running the solution as a 400-customer pilot, keeps the data in its back-end servers for customer relationship management applications.

How did Richards get through the lean years of the early 1990s?

"We kept our heads down in the lab and worked . . . on software for kids," he said.