Back in 1986, I had no idea who H. Ross Perot was. Nor did I really care. However, he not only played a unique role in American politics back in the 1990s, but he also was instrumental in the forming of the global technology powerhouse known as CustomerCentrix, LLC. By extension, he was critical to the development of LoadStorm because CustomerCentrix is our parent company.
Therefore it is only fitting that today we honor the 80th birthday of one H. Ross Perot, founder of information technology giant
Electronic Data Systems (EDS).
EDS was purchased by General Motors in the eighties because the IT outsourcing industry was booming and because GM had a poor track record with information technology. As a student in Nashville, TN during those days it was huge news when GM announced the creation of Saturn – a new car company to remake all the old manufacturing paradigms encumbering the US Big Three. The first plant was planned for a small town just south of Nashville. It was going to be an enormously beneficial investment for the area and for the whole country. We all believed the hype! So I determined that my career as a computer scientist should start with the biggest revolution in American business, and I set about getting a job in the computer side of Saturn.
That led me to EDS. I got hired as a young programmer and shipped off to Detroit to learn the car business while Saturn was formed. It was a couple of years before they broke ground on the plant in Tennessee. In the meantime, I was trained to program GMF robots in Advanced Manufacturing Engineering group of CPC (Chevrolet, Pontiac, GMC). All of that is changed or gone today, including Saturn too I guess, but it didn’t matter to me because my career plans were derailed before I could get back to Nashville.
In late 1986 or early 1987, I showed up for work one morning and a GM engineer shoved a newspaper in my face while nearly shouting, “We are finally getting rid of your boss! He won’t be criticizing us in the press daily any more. Good riddance. Everything was fine before we bought EDS.”
Oh boy. First of all, nothing was fine at GM from my perspective. It had an entitlement mentality where the engineers made several times what EDS was paying us computer guys, and they apparently needed to hang around the coffee machine for hours every day. If the company got a full 20 productive hours of their employees each week, then it would be a shock to me. I really liked many of the GM engineers that I supported. They were nice and accepted me as a co-worker. That said, they had been trained to not work too hard. Work ethic from Ross Perot was the totally opposite. EDS worked its employees 60 hours and never paid overtime. It was brutal at times.
Well, after the buyout, most funding for EDS project dried up. One day my boss called and offered me a transfer to an exciting project in Denver. I accepted immediately and was loaded in a U-Haul (EDS was cheap too) about 3 days later.
When I arrived, one guy in the new office offered to help me unload the U-Haul. Roger Campbell. That produced one of the best friendships and eventually business partnerships that I have ever experienced in my life. I always respected Roger as the “alpha geek” because he would go home after work and code in Pascal on his personal computer. That may not seem unusual to you today, but in 1987 only a few people had personal computers and probably less than 0.0000000001% of the world population would actually write programs on one. He was impressive in a community of geeks, standing head and shoulders above us other wannabe code slingers.
Roger and I started CustomerCentrix in 1997 to develop software and provide web consulting. It has been a pleasure to show up for work since that fateful day 14 years ago. Along the way, we hit barriers to running load tests on our web applications. The outrageous costs of legacy performance testing tools prompted us to see the opportunities that awaited us in the performance testing industry. All due to the Texan entrepreneur who left IBM to start a software company. Perot was instrumental in helping LoadStorm become a reality.
Ross…thanks for telling the truth about GM. Thanks for getting the incompetent GM board to pay you double the stock value to shut you up. Thanks for arranging the business partnership between Roger and me.
Sorry about that whole failed presidential bid though. You really did portray a great candidate until you went nuts and quit. I was campaigning for you because I thought it would be great to have a passionate non-politician shaking up the status quo. Didn’t work out well, did it?