Jack D. Kuehler, Former I.B.M. President, Dies at 76
Jack D. Kuehler, an electrical engineer who became the highest ranking technologist at I.B.M. and guided strategy as president and later vice chairman while the company dominated the world’s computing landscape in the 1980s, died on Dec. 20 in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif. He was 76.
Jack D. Kuehler in 1992.
The cause was Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Carmen Kuehler.
Mr. Kuehler, who was revered by the company’s engineering rank and file, stood out in a company that was defined by its blue-suited sales force. Confronting the rise of the microprocessor-based personal computer, Mr. Kuehler guided I.B.M. into the open-standards PC workstation business. The resulting computing platform would become the basis for a system that remains the foundation of the company’s designs to this day.
Mr. Kuehler was the architect of a series of alliances for I.B.M., shoring up American technology competitiveness and restoring his company’s position in the industry as it found itself increasingly under attack from competitors.
He was instrumental in an investment that I.B.M. made in the chip maker Intel when that company was struggling because of the rise of Japanese memory chip manufacturers. He led I.B.M. into a partnership with Hitachi, once one of its most tenacious rivals. He also played a central role in the creation of Sematech, an industry-government alliance created in 1987 to help save the American semiconductor industry.
Later, as Microsoft and Intel became dominant forces in the personal computing world, Mr. Kuehler helped shape a partnership with Apple and Motorola in an effort to create a desktop competitor based on combining I.B.M. hardware and Apple’s software expertise. The resulting PowerPC microprocessor became the basis for Apple’s computers from 1994 to 2006.
Mr. Kuehler represented an engineering culture that made I.B.M. a technology powerhouse for more than three decades at the height of its dominance in mainframe computing.
“He was the best of class of a generation of computer engineers in the mainframe era,” said Andrew Grove, former chief executive and chairman of Intel. “He was scrupulously straight and passionately competitive.”
Inside I.B.M., Mr. Kuehler helped nurture a culture that protected designers known as “wild ducks,” an I.B.M. label for computer designers who refused to “fly in formation.”
One of those engineers was R. Andrew Heller, a manager who originally led the company into both the Unix and the microprocessor business in the 1980s.
“Jack was a brilliant tactician,” said Mr. Heller. “He was very helpful in protecting the engineering culture inside I.B.M.”
Indeed, Mr. Kuehler served as mentor for a generation of the company’s managers.
“Most of what I became at I.B.M. was because of him,” said Nicholas M. Donofrio, who followed Mr. Kuehler as I.B.M.’s technology strategist. “He understood the value of technology and semiconductors, and he knew that they were a key ingredient of I.B.M.’s business.”
Jack Kuehler was born in Grand Island, Neb., in 1932. He studied mechanical engineering at Santa Clara University and received a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the university. Mr. Kuehler started at I.B.M. as an associate engineer at the San Jose Research Laboratory in 1958.
He was elected I.B.M. senior vice president in May 1982. He became vice chairman of the board and a member of the executive committee in January 1988. He was elected president in May 1989 and resumed the title of vice chairman in 1993.
He was a trustee of Santa Clara University, and in 2005, with his wife, he donated $1 million to its engineering school.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Kuehler is survived by five children, Cindy, Daniel and Christy Chappell, all of the San Diego area, Michael, of Darien, Conn., and David, of Cincinnati; and by 12 grandchildren.
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