5 biggest U-turns in the IT industry
Did we say that? Well, we didn't mean it
5. Steve Ballmer saying "Linux is a cancer" and a decade later Microsoft going open source
In fairness, Ballmer himself said this in one of (many) unguarded moments, but it's an excellent illustration of how the landscape has changed in a relatively short time.
"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches," he said in 2001 when speaking to the Chicago Sun-Times.
And at Build 2014, Computing sat there and watched Microsoft hit the button to open source the .Net Compiler Platform and C#, before subsequently welcoming Bash into Windows 10.
5 biggest U-turns in the IT industry
Did we say that? Well, we didn't mean it
4. HP says it'll spin off its Personal Systems Group, fires CEO, doesn't spin off group
In August 2011, HP CEO Léo Apotheker announced that HP would be spinning off its Personal Systems Group (PSG) - the company's PC and laptops business.
Board members weren't very impressed (the acquisition of Autonomy for $10bn, which it is still smarting over to this day, probably didn't help) and Apotheker was swiftly replaced with Meg Whitman.
Whitman wasted no time in overturning the decision completely, and keeping the PSG division where it was.
Since then, though, Whitman herself has engineered just the kind of split that Apotheker was planning, cutting the company into HP Inc for PCs and printers, and HP Enterprise for pretty much everything else.
The message? Meg Whitman wasn't afraid to take the job and not only do a swift U-turn on her predeccesor's decision, but to do her own U-turn a few years later.
5 biggest U-turns in the IT industry
Did we say that? Well, we didn't mean it
3. Xbox One games won't be resaleable or lendable without restrictive disc-tracking through Microsoft services
When the Xbox One was revealed at E3 in 2013, that was the stern message from Microsoft. The computer giant clearly wanted to control the market, get a piece of the profit from every second-hand sale, and it was even suggested that the company may be aiming to cut out not just the second-hand market, but the physical-disc media market, too.
That was until Sony, currying favour with outraged gamers, revealed the opposite policy entirely with its PS4, prompting a wheedling Microsoft blog a little while later:
"I am announcing the following changes to Xbox One and how you can play, share, lend, and resell your games exactly as you do today on Xbox 360" wrote Microsoft interactive entertainment president Don Mattrick, weeks before legging it to work at Zynga.
The announcement included the removal of a restriction to be always connected to the internet while using the console, as well as abandoning the disc-tracking feature for retailers.
"These changes will impact some of the scenarios we previously announced for Xbox One," he concluded, rather sniffily.
Like anyone cared about those.
5 biggest U-turns in the IT industry
Did we say that? Well, we didn't mean it
2. Steve Jobs asks "Who wants a stylus?" a few years before Apple launches the Apple Pencil
Steve Jobs may, sadly, have been long departed when the decision was taken to begin playing catchup with other companies and launch (to an unnecessarily great fanfare) the Apple Pencil, when it unveiled the iPad Pro, in 2015. But it's still a great example of a company turning its outlook around and having to do exactly the opposite thing it said it would in the first place.
The biggest tragedy of all this is it doesn't even seem like the device is selling too well. How many have you seen in active use in the past few months?
5 biggest U-turns in the IT industry
Did we say that? Well, we didn't mean it
1. Larry Ellison asks, "What the hell is cloud computing?" then a few years later announces a load of cloud products
It was inevitably number one, but then this U-turn isn't quite as straightforward as it looks. What Ellison was arguably doing was debunking the 'ginormous amount of marketing claptrap around slathered over the term 'cloud computing'.
While making the statement, he sarcastically claimed: "We've redefined cloud computing to include everything we already do" and added that "the people who write this [marketing] crap are out there!".
Oracle now seems to acknowledge, publically, that SaaS, PaaS and IaaS are indeed all cloud, as Ellison said he didn't want to "fight the thing" and, as Ellison said, if "changing words on a few ads" was enough to sound cloud, he's gone right there.
However, we can't help feel that Ellison's original attitude was entirely justified.