Donald Ferguson commenting on why Websphere was his "biggest technology mistake:"

Because I had come from working on big mission-critical systems, I thought it needs to be scalable, reliable, have a single point of control ... I tried to build something like a mainframe, a system that was capable of doing anything, that would be able to do what might be needed in five years.

I call it the endgame fallacy. It was too complex for people to master. I overdesigned it.

Because we were IBM, we survived it, but if we'd been a start-up, we'd have gone to the wall.