Success Quote by Arthur Rock

IBM decided they were going to enter the copying business in 1968 is the kind of bland corporate sentence that, in Arthur Rock's mouth, becomes a warning shot. Rock is venture capital royalty, a man who watched whole industries appear, calcify, and get ambushed. He doesn't dress it up because he doesn't need to: the menace is baked into the subject. When IBM decides, markets don't "evolve" so much as get rearranged.

The specific intent is to mark a turning point when copying stopped being a scrappy technology story and became a scale-and-distribution story. 1968 matters because it's late enough that copying had already been culturally normalized in offices, yet early enough that the competitive landscape could still be rewritten by a giant with sales forces, service contracts, and procurement relationships. Rock is pointing to the moment the rules changed: innovation alone no longer wins; incumbency can.

The subtext is about power asymmetry. "Enter" is a euphemism, as if IBM were politely walking into a room rather than bringing its own room. Rock is reminding you that in business, especially in hardware-heavy eras, the biggest advantage isn't the machine, it's the muscle: manufacturing capacity, financing terms, maintenance networks, and the ability to bundle copying into broader enterprise deals.

In context, the line reads like a venture capitalist's shorthand for why small companies fear certain headlines. It's not nostalgia; it's pattern recognition. When a dominant platform chooses your category, your runway shortens, your valuation shifts, and your strategy stops being about building the best product and starts being about surviving contact with a behemoth.