This Tough Guy Wants to Give You A Hug

摘要

Like many of its employees, EDS has suffered a terribly repressed existence. Partly that's because when EDS does its work well-assembling and operating computer systems for customers-it is invisible. You know, for example, that IBM ran the buggy networks at this year's Atlanta Olympics, not that EDS ran the networks in Barcelona flawlessly. But EDS's anonymity is also the result of having had to labor for years in some very long shadows. At first the company was synonymous with Ross Perot, the overbearing publicity hound who founded Electronic Data Systems in 1962. Perot sold out to General Motors in 1984 and stayed in the picture only two years before leaving to found, in 1988, the more appropriately named Perot Systems. After Perot, EDS struggled to find an identity within GM, the bureaucratic leviathan that prevented EDS from growing as quickly as it might have as an independent company.