Tag: Bob Djurdjevic
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WHEN BIGGER STOPS BEING SMARTER
For the article excerpt/teaser, I’d use: We are building bigger and bigger machines in order to make them smarter. But what happens when increasing size requires more of their intelligence merely to manage their own complexity? From Leopold Kohr in 1957, through IBM and the mainframe era, to today’s vast AI data centers, an old…
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How a Policeman Assaulted My Wife Today at a Serbian Courthouse
When my wife called from the First Basic Court in Belgrade, I barely recognized her voice. She was sobbing uncontrollably, gasping for breath, unable to complete a sentence. Between cries, she shouted only one word: “Đubreta!” (“Scum!”). Minutes later I learned why. According to her account, a policeman grabbed her by both arms and dragged…
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HOW BIG BLUE ROPED ME BACK INTO THE CIA SADDLE
Just when I thought I had finally retired from analyzing the computer industry, IBM had other ideas. A Wall Street Journal headline about the biggest one-day decline in Big Blue’s history unexpectedly roped me back into the CIA saddle—not the one in Langley, but the one I first envisioned at a computer industry show in…
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“IT IS ENGLISH”
In 1985, during a visit to Hitachi, I asked why Japan—despite its engineering excellence—lagged in software. The answer was disarmingly simple: “It is English.” That moment revealed a deeper truth about the future of computing. Returning home, I proposed a radical idea: digitize everything and make it searchable. It seemed obvious. It was. Yet nearly…
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FROM “EUROTOPIA” TO BERLIN
A trip from Vienna to Berlin revealed more than urban decay—it exposed a deeper systemic drift. What appears as small signs of disorder may in fact be symptoms of something larger: institutions that have grown too complex, too removed from the people they serve. Drawing on firsthand experience—from corporate America to 1980s Germany—this column traces…
