The Four Hundred

OS/400 Edition
Volume 11, Number 49 -- November 25, 2002

Malcolm Haines Returns to IBM

by Alex Woodie

Malcolm Haines, the imaginative marketer whose colorful and off-beat advertising campaigns won him respect from a hard-to-please AS/400 installed base during a 25-year career promoting products from Rochester, returned to IBM last week after a 15-month absence. The news sparked hope among OS/400 loyalists that Haines' return may ignite a creative spark in IBM's advertising that has been missing for some time.

Haines announced his intention to leave IBM in July 2001, to become worldwide vice president of marketing at Lazy Software, a British startup cofounded by Haines' boyhood friend Simon Williams. (Williams was the founder of case tool maker Synon as well.) Haines stayed in the United States to help push Lazy Software's product, an advanced database management system based on the associative model of data, called Sentences. (Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition, profiled the latest version of Sentences last week.) Sources say that Lazy Software's expansion into the United States, and the uptake of the Sentences database, has been slower than originally expected.

For whatever reason, Haines left Lazy Software and exercised the option to return to IBM that was left open when he began his leave of absence in August 2001. His first day back working in IBM's marketing organization in Somers, New York, was last Monday. He is reportedly working for the iSeries vice president of marketing, Cecelia Marrese. His new title is Chief Imagination Officer. Haines was not available for comment at press time.

Industry observers have hailed Haines as a genius and one of the most creative people at IBM. His career at IBM began in 1973 as an engineer, but his most recognized contributions have been in marketing. His most remembered campaign appeared overseas. In his native England, where he enjoyed a certain degree of creative autonomy as head of IBM United Kingdom's AS/400 marketing effort, Haines blanketed London in 1993 with AS/400 messages on taxicabs, receipts for taxicab rides, and even messages from the drivers of those taxicabs. The 1993 London campaign is regarded by Haines and industry observers as his finest piece of work. IBM's brass also benefited from the saturation-style marketing campaign, as AS/400 sales increased by 20 percent that year (although Haines says many factors likely contributed to that increase).

Haines also dabbled in pseudo-guerilla marketing tactics long before it was the cool thing to do. The 1993 London campaign also used graffiti messages written with spray paint, although this approach stopped short of defacing public property, which both IBM and Microsoft have recently done to spread their marketing messages in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City. Haines also reportedly once hired a group of people in Berlin to pose as protesters and hold pro-AS/400 signs outside of a conference.

More recently, Haines' "battleship" approach to marketing has resulted in giant blimps flashing AS/400 messages to unsuspecting attendees of two Lotusphere trade shows, in 1999 and 2000, and a giant stretch Hummer limousine at a conference in Las Vegas. The fall 2000 COMMON conference in Baltimore may forever be remembered as the setting for Haines' widely heralded "Dance of the Sugar Plum Servers," a play that pits the forces of good and evil against each other for the battle of IT minds. Haines also left his mark on the spring 2001 COMMON conference in New Orleans, where the first iSeries Nation gathering was held. It was Haines' idea to create the iSeries Nation.

As the OS/400 platform's self-proclaimed "Minister of Propaganda," Haines also put together several CDs and videos. These include "The Case for AS/400," which documents the fictional court case FATSO (Federation of Anti-AS/400 Technicians, Soothsayers, and Operatives) versus AS/400, and "The Best Architecture in the World II." Frank Soltis, the IBM systems architect credited with leading the design of OS/400's advanced architecture, calls Haines a friend and "one of the most creative people at IBM." Simon Williams said Haines "took an IBM midrange system and captured the imagination and loyalty of a community in a manner we may never see again."

On that last point, many hope Williams is wrong. "We know the guy's creative," says Neil Palmer, a system engineer at OS/400 ISV DPS and a friend and a colleague of Haines on the iSeries Nation citizen's council. "It'd be great to have him back, but hopefully his hands aren't tied behind his back." Al Barsa, an OS/400 consultant and reseller in New York, echoed those sentiments. "Malcolm Haines is a genius," he said. "He was forced to fight for the platform with both hands tied behind his back, which must have been extremely frustrating."

Haines' departure roughly coincided with an increase in eServer marketing by IBM. Supporters of the OS/400 platform say eServer ads do not do enough to promote the iSeries. However, the latest push into e-business on demand and autonomic computing play well to the platform's strengths, they say, and could end up boosting OS/400's value to IBM.

"OS/400 is getting much more respect now than it has for years. Since they've introduced eLiza, they've started to realize they already have a product that does that," Palmer says. "It's differentiate or die, these days. Maybe they're finally realizing that they've got more to gain by pushing the iSeries than they've got to lose."

The Green Streak promotion will likely end up helping IBM's fourth quarter iSeries sales, but it's mainly targeted at current OS/400 users, not landing new customers. We do know that IBM executives will be targeting more resources at attracting new customers to the box in 2003, but we don't yet know how. With Haines back on the team, IBM has someone with a proven ability to generate interest in the box. Whether IBM gives him the creative freedom to succeed in that regard, though, has yet to be seen.

Editor's Note: This article has been edited since its original publication to correct an error. Neil Palmer is a system engineer, not a programmer, as originally stated. Guild Companies regrets the error. [Corrections made 12/3/02]