Time & Perspective Quote by Adam Osborne

Osborne’s line lands like a compliment with a knife in it: IBM’s “successful history” is held up not as a model of excellence, but as proof that markets don’t reward merit so much as momentum. The barb works because it violates the polite fiction of tech culture-that the best product naturally wins-and replaces it with a grimmer, more accurate metric: distribution, standards, lock-in, and institutional trust.

The escalation is the joke and the thesis. “Best product” is already a familiar provocation; “You don't even have to have a good product” is the cynical turn of the screw. It suggests that “number one” is often an outcome of corporate gravity rather than innovation: procurement departments choosing the safe bet, compatibility trumping elegance, and an ecosystem so entrenched that alternatives are punished for being different. Osborne is pointing at the soft power of platforms before “platform” became the default vocabulary.

Context matters because Osborne wasn’t just heckling from the cheap seats. As a computer entrepreneur whose own company imploded after he publicly announced a “next” machine too early (the classic Osborne Effect), he had lived the difference between product quality and market fate. His jab at IBM reads as both diagnosis and warning: obsess over engineering if you like, but understand the machinery of dominance. The subtext is almost fatalistic-technology is political economy in a lab coat-and the real competition isn’t features; it’s permanence.