Open
How Compaq Ended IBM's PC Domination and Helped Invent Modern Computing
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Narrated by:
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Paul Boehmer
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By:
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Rod Canion
About this listen
The story of Compaq is well-known: Three ex-Texas Instruments managers founded Compaq with modest venture funding. Just four years later, Compaq was on the Fortune 500 list, and, two years after that, they had exceeded $1 billion in annual revenue. No company had ever achieved these milestones so rapidly.
But few know the story behind the story. In 1982, when Compaq was founded, there was no software standardization, so every brand of personal computer required its own unique application software. Just eight years later, compatibility with the open PC standard had become ubiquitous, and it has continued to be for over two decades.
This didn’t happen by accident. Cofounder and then CEO Rod Canion and his team made a series of risky and daring decisions - often facing criticism and incredulity - that allowed the open PC standard marketplace to thrive and the incredible benefits of open computing to be realized.
A never-before-published insider account of Compaq’s extraordinary strategies and decisions, Open provides valuable lessons in leadership in times of crisis, management decision-making under the pressure of extraordinary growth, and the power of a unique, pervasive culture.
Open tells the incredible story of Compaq’s meteoric rise from humble beginnings to become the PC industry leader in just over a decade. Along the way, Compaq helped change the face of computing while establishing the foundation for today’s world of tablets and smart phones.
©2013 Rod Canion (P)2013 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Imagine what Atari might have achieved if Steve Jobs had stayed there to develop the first massmarket personal computer. Or what Steve Case might have done for PepsiCo if he hadn't left for a gaming start-up that eventually became AOL. What if Salomon Brothers had kept Michael Bloomberg, or Bear Stearns had exploited the inventive ideas of Stephen Ross? Scores of top-tier entrepreneurs worked for established corporations before they struck out on their own and became self-made billionaires.
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Waste of time!
- By Anonymous User on 05-30-20
By: John Sviokla, and others
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Winning with Data
- Transform Your Culture, Empower Your People, and Shape the Future
- By: Tomasz Tunguz, Frank Bien
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Winning with Data explores the cultural changes big data brings to business, and shows you how to adapt your organization to leverage data to maximum effect. Authors Tomasz Tunguz and Frank Bien draw on extensive background in big data, business intelligence, and business strategy to provide a blueprint for companies looking to move head-on into the data wave. Instrumentation is discussed in detail, but the core of the change is in the culture.
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Content marketing
- By Adam Winn on 12-22-16
By: Tomasz Tunguz, and others
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Mastering the VC Game
- A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get from Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms
- By: Jeffrey Bussgang
- Narrated by: Ramon De Ocampo
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Finding the right venture capitalist to back your start-up is a challenge. Even if you manage to get backing, you want your VC to be a partner, not some dictator who will undermine your vision and take control of your life's work. Jeffrey Bussgang is one of a very few people who have played on both sides of this high-stakes game. Now he draws on his unique perspective to offer high-level insights, colorful stories, and practical advice. He reveals how to get noticed, perfect a pitch, and negotiate a partnership that works for everyone.
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slow in beginning but gets really good
- By Diana on 04-11-19
By: Jeffrey Bussgang
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The Reinventors
- How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change
- By: Jason Jennings
- Narrated by: Jason Jennings
- Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Eventually every job and every business will become irrelevant. According to Jason Jennings, the past few decades have seen unprecedented shifts: former third-world nations have transformed themselves into high-tech manufacturing powerhouses; technology has democratized business and increased competition in ways never before seen; and customers, used to getting exactly what they want when they want it, are no longer beholden to the corporate giants.
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Good advice
- By Myers on 07-28-18
By: Jason Jennings
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Good to Great
- Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't
- By: Jim Collins
- Narrated by: Jim Collins
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Built To Last, the defining management study of the 90s, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about companies that are not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?
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Good info, over-the-top narration
- By Anaxamaxan on 08-31-10
By: Jim Collins
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No Better Time
- The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet
- By: Molly Knight Raskin
- Narrated by: Christine Marshall
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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No Better Time tells of a young, driven mathematical genius who wrote a set of algorithms that would create a faster, better Internet. It's the story of a beautiful friendship between a loud, irreverent student and his soft-spoken MIT professor, of a husband and father who spent years struggling to make ends meet only to become a billionaire almost overnight with the success of Akamai Technologies, the Internet content delivery network he cofounded with his mentor.
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An Overlooked Hero of 9-11
- By Jean on 05-27-16
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Finish Big
- How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top
- By: Bo Burlingham
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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When pioneering business journalist and Inc. magazine editor at large Bo Burlingham wrote Small Giants, it became an instant classic for its original take on a common business problem - how to handle the pressure to grow. Now Burlingham is back to tackle an even more common problem - how to exit your company well. Sooner or later, all entrepreneurs leave their businesses and all businesses get sold, given away, or liquidated.
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Begin with the end in mind
- By D. Hartzell on 02-05-15
By: Bo Burlingham
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Car Guys vs. Bean Counters
- The Battle for the Soul of American Business
- By: Bob Lutz
- Narrated by: Norman Dietz
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2001, General Motors hired Bob Lutz out of retirement with a mandate to save the company by making great cars again. He launched a war against penny pinching, office politics, turf wars, and risk avoidance. After declaring bankruptcy during the recession of 2008, GM is back on track thanks to its embrace of Lutz's philosophy. When Lutz got into the auto business in the early sixties, CEOs knew that if you captured the public's imagination with great cars, the money would follow.
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Opinionated and one-sided
- By Michael Parks on 06-23-11
By: Bob Lutz
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Becoming Facebook
- The 10 Challenges That Defined the Company That's Disrupting the World
- By: Mike Hoefflinger
- Narrated by: Nicholas Techosky
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Facebook's founding is legend: In a Harvard dorm, wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg invented a new way to connect with friends...and the rest is history. But for the people who actually molded this great idea into a game-changing $300 billion company, the experience was far more tumultuous and uncertain than we might expect. Mike Hoefflinger was one of those Facebook insiders.
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mainly a tribute to the success of FB
- By Anonymous User on 10-07-18
By: Mike Hoefflinger
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Predictable Success
- Getting Your Organization on the Growth Track - and Keeping It There
- By: Les McKeown
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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No matter what kind of organization you work for, whether it's your own small business or a global Fortune 100 company, your number one goal is success. Predictable Success takes you step-by-step through a startlingly simple, intuitive, and universal process that shows you how to bring sustained, lasting, predictable success to your organization.
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No substance or real solid information to take
- By Desiree Sherbundy on 07-06-22
By: Les McKeown
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The Intelligent Entrepreneur
- By: Bill Murphy Jr.
- Narrated by: Fred Berman, L. J. Ganser
- Length: 12 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1998, three Harvard Business School graduates - two men and one woman - turned down six-figure salaries at big corporations, bet on themselves, and launched their own new companies. By their 10-year reunion, their audacity had paid huge dividends. They'd made many millions of dollars, created hundreds of jobs and left their mark on the world. The Intelligent Entrepreneur tells the compelling and instructive story of how these three young founders did it.
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Terrible waste $ and a lot of time
- By David on 01-23-11
By: Bill Murphy Jr.
What listeners say about Open
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Tommy
- 09-06-23
Neat story about an underdog in the PC market
Is the Narrator a text to speech program? Sounds artificial and stilted.
Story is good if you’ve lived through the times.
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- Ossie Moore
- 08-05-18
Uninspiring Lovefest with Little Substance
Reads more like cliff notes of a larger book by a super fanboy where Compaq is portrayed a hero with no flaws who handily dominates everyone.
At the end, he even seems to portray Compaq as a big reason for Apple's success.
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- Jakub Musialek
- 10-07-24
Compaq the story of perfection
If you're building a company and you want to read about someone who did it in a very short time , with a lot of quality in mind this is a story MUST read.
This is a very good story; I love the idea of focusing in your company on one thing and committing to this thing to deliver unparapbble quality, speed, performance, and many others.
I love the story because it is also about the people developing something which was unreal that time, fighting with the big brand at the same time having a lot of luck in the process!.
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- Rodney
- 02-04-19
Interesting
Overall the book is exactly what the description says it is, it's the beginnings of Compaq, which is a pretty interesting story. The only downside is how short the book is considering the history it's covering, it really doesn't go into any depth on anything and moves along, in opinion, way too quickly. This book easily could have been 2-3x longer and I think it would have held the audience, but then again perhaps too much time had gone by by the time it was written and too much detail was lost by the author.
I'd hope before everyone involved with this is gone that you'd have someone come in and write the history of Compaq from a few different angles just to have that additional detail, because, again, the story is really interesting and really important from a tech standpoint.
Overall I'd give this book 4/5. The reader does a good professional job.
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- MrRedBeard
- 02-26-16
The PC revolution was more than Apple and Microsof
Compaq at the end was not a favorable company but at its conception Compaq was simply amazing.
The audio editing of this book is lacking even used wrong words, repeated parts of sentences and cut off before a sentence was finished. The edit and narration completely changed a little more than half way through to a near perfect version. Not sure what happened.
The narrator was not a good fit for this book.
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- Greg King
- 06-14-15
Amazing account of how the PC market became what it is today
What a great story. My only real complaint is the robotic nature of the narrator. Not terrible, but definitely noticeable.
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- Wick Smith
- 07-13-14
Wrong narrator for this book
Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?
Absolutely. But probably only of interest to those people who lived through the early years of the PC market, when companies like Compaq were trying to compete with IBM.
What was one of the most memorable moments of Open?
I was always interested in Compaq's decision to move ahead with the 386 before IBM. Canion seems to believe that IBM's hesitation to lead with this chip was due to its concentration on MicroChannel. I worked with marketers from IBM at that time, and they told me the reason was to protect the System/36. They believed that the power and memory management of the 386 would tempt many customers to buy a cheap PC instead of a more costly mini for many applications. Also, IBM had a RISC System 6000 in the works to compete with SPARC and a 386 announcement would have muddied the waters. Their opinion.
Would you be willing to try another one of Paul Boehmer’s performances?
Sure, but not for a technical book. I don't know how old he is, but everyone at that time pronounced the IBM PS/2 Pee-Ess-Too, not Pee-Ess-Slash-Too. Say it once or twice and it's merely annoying. But fifty or sixty times and it is truly irritating. Also, the new bus that Compq developed (EISA) was universally pronounced ee sa, not eye-sa. A very quick check on the Internet would have resolved this in a matter of seconds. This is probably the fault of the editor or producer, but the narrator gets the blame. He seemed to have no feel for the material. I can't blame him entirely if the material is not of interest to him. The whole production just seemed sloppy.
Do you think Open needs a follow-up book? Why or why not?
No, This is basically a CEO congratulating himself for making good decisions. The somnolent narration makes this book sound like a boring guy who lived through interesting times. No question Canion was the right guy at the right time to lead Compaq through a number of critical decision points that could have endangered the whole company. But maybe the story would have been more interestingly told by a third party with a less rosy view of Canion's performance. This particular narrative makes Canion the hero at every turn, The crowds cheer, the gutless competitors flounder. If there is a follow-up, it should be written by someone else.
Any additional comments?
Despite its flaws, this is a fascinating book for anyone who was involved in the early days of what has come to be known as the clone wars. It is wonderfully nostalgic for those of us who drooled over the idea of a 10 megabyte hard disk. It made me go and take a look at copies of PC Magazine and PC World that I saved from that era. They were exciting times and Rod Canion was right in the thick of it. I'm glad that he decided to write down his recollection of that time. But it may take another authjor with access to more people to fill out the history that "Open" is trying to tell.
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- Jonathan C. Masters
- 03-27-19
Still relevant today
This is a wonderful history of a turbulent time in our industry. Rod's words are still relevant today. The buses have changed, but we are still in a quest for openness. After reading this book, I reached out to Rod and had a number of productive conversations. He's a great guy.
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- Dmitri
- 11-17-15
Great story but bad narrator.
Berry interesting book ruined by bad robotic like narrator. I'll probably bay this book to read on my Kindle.
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- Patrick McHugh
- 09-04-14
Is a computer reading this.
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
Yes, especially if they were involved with the PC industry - early on.
Who was your favorite character and why?
Bill Gates. While a bit player, sounds like, when Compaq was in a pinch, they always called Bill.
Would you be willing to try another one of Paul Boehmer’s performances?
Probably not. He is probably capable, but it really sounds like a computer is narrating this. What is really weird, is that the narration became more "human" in Chapter 14.
If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?
Goliath (IBM) versus David (The rest - led by Compaq)
Any additional comments?
Narrating a technical book is probably not easy. But one must become familiar with the terminology and pronouncing of technical terms. Might have sounded more passionate if the author had read it?!
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