
Strategy Formulation: The Internet and the Web as Major Disruptive Forces
John R. Patrick, former IBM vice president for internet strategy, guest lectures in MIT's ESD.57 Technology-based Business Transformation course, taught with Irving Wladawsky-Berger. Patrick walks through how IBM came to see the internet and the Web as disruptive forces threatening its existing business model in the early 1990s, and how that recognition led to the formulation of IBM's internet strategy. He covers the internal politics and analysis behind strategy formulation at a large incumbent firm facing a platform shift, drawing on his own role building that strategy from within. The lecture closes with his views on where the internet was headed next. Running nearly three hours, it functions as a first-hand case study in corporate strategy under technological disruption, useful for students studying business transformation, innovation management, or the history of enterprise computing.