Q A When I wrote my doctoral thesis at project management, and so on— Harvard in the early 1980s, it was clear to large-scale industrial software. to me that the next future challenge for Japanese companies would be writing I found most were taking IBM software. In a post-doctoral project I did approaches to software development. at Harvard Business School from 1984 There was nothing lean about it, by the to 1986, half of my time I spent studying way. It was almost the complete opposite consumer electronic projects with a of lean or what we would today call agile. Harvard professor, Richard Rosenbloom, and the other half I spent studying TCS: So it was true waterfall approaches Japanese ‘software factories’—i.e., to software development? largely how the big Japanese computer Cusumano: It was very waterfall. manufacturers such as Fujitsu, NEC, and However, Japanese software developers Hitachi developed their software. were good at quality. But they didn’t have a good business model for making Then I published a book in 1991— money from the software itself. They called Japan’s Software Factories—on were essentially selling hardware who started the factory idea, how like IBM had done for many years, they evolved, and so on. The Japanese building operating systems and some essentially copied how U.S. computer applications. But they didn’t really know manufacturers like IBM ran their own how to make money from software. software development centers in the 1970s and 1980s, because the After this study came out in 1991, from Japanese companies were mostly being very interested in software and making IBM-mainframe compatible the new personal computers, I decided hardware and software. I got interested to ‘follow the money,’ as I like to say. in the question of whether Japanese Who was actually making money from companies could apply the expertise software? It was Microsoft. Yet nothing they had accumulated in manufacturing had really been written about how and engineering—quality control, Microsoft developed software.