PC Mag: Innovators Tom Hardy

[dcdomain]

Not sure if this has been posted yet, I did a search on Tom Hardy and it turned up nothing:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2124401,00.asp

Innovators: Tom Hardy
When the first IBM ThinkPad debuted in the summer of 1992, it reinvented the notion of mobile computing. And it wouldn't have happened without Tom Hardy. As the '80s became the '90s, Tom Hardy was IBM's head of corporate design, and the primary voice calling for a laptop that would put aesthetics and ease of use above raw power.

In 1989, along with German-born designer Richard Sapper, Hardy developed a corporate-wide "personality strategy," meant to convince the world that IBM was still an innovative company. "We were trying to bring a freshness to all our products," he says. "And we decided to start with notebooks."

Early the next year, he visited Sapper's studio in Milan, and the two of them met with Kazuhiko Yamazaki, a designer with IBM's notebook operation in Japan. At one point, Sapper suggested they base their new notebook on the bento box, the classic ebony-colored Japanese lunchbox, and Hardy rammed the idea through.

It wasn't easy. Thanks to regulations in Germany and other parts of Europe—which claimed that PCs in any color other than off-white put a strain on the eyes of office workers—black notebooks were out of bounds. "We decided to go with black anyway," Hardy says. "And IBM Germany went berserk." In the end, the Germans sold the ThinkPad with a disclaimer that read "Not for Office Use."

But the real triumph was the TrackPoint, the mouse surrogate developed by IBM Research. Hardy and his team tucked the TrackPoint—not originally intended for notebooks—into the middle of the ThinkPad's keyboard, and then they colored it red, so it would stand out from the rest of the keys.

The trouble was that IBM, then the very epitome of corporate intransigence, had a longstanding rule that forbade the use of red on anything other than the emergency power switch on mainframes. So Hardy insisted that the TrackPoint was magenta. "You know it's red," said the head of corporate standards. "No, it's magenta," Hardy answered. And we all know who came out on top.

[ryengineer]

But the real triumph was the TrackPoint, the mouse surrogate developed by IBM Research. Hardy and his team tucked the TrackPoint—not originally intended for notebooks—into the middle of the ThinkPad's keyboard, and then they colored it red, so it would stand out from the rest of the keys."...........

.......And we all know who came out on top.

Hardy

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