Electronic Data Systems

» see eds.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

On 23 September 2009 Hewlett-Packard stopped using a name it had paid 13.9 billion dollars for thirteen months earlier. The Register carried it that day as the EDS name being gone, and the company that had more or less invented the business of running other companies' computers started going to market as HP Enterprise Services instead.

Ross Perot founded Electronic Data Systems in Dallas on 27 June 1962. As an IBM salesman he had watched customers buy expensive machines and then fail to use them properly. What he sold was the missing part: people who knew how. One early contract matched the unused computer time at Southwestern Life Insurance against the computing demand at Collins Radio, both in Dallas, both known intimately to Perot from the inside. Morton Meyerson arrived in 1966 as employee number 54 and in 1967 proposed the business model the world eventually called outsourcing.

Revenue passed 100 million dollars in 1975. By 1979 it stood at 270 million with 8,000 employees and no debt, and by the time HP closed its acquisition in August 2008 the company was billing 22.1 billion a year and employing 136,000 people. Hardly any of it was visible to a person who had never signed one of the contracts. The nearest EDS ever came to the public was a Super Bowl commercial in 2000 about cowboys herding cats, which is remembered considerably better than anything the company actually built. Every load-bearing part of this story predates the 14.4k modem I started out on in 1998, and none of it was built to be looked at from outside the contract.

~ the dossier ~

~ the general motors years ~

General Motors bought EDS in 1984 for around 2.5 billion dollars, the most anyone had yet paid for a computer services business, and Perot joined the GM board as its largest individual shareholder with 0.8 percent of the stock. He then spent two years saying in public exactly what he thought of how GM was run. In December 1986 the company offered him 56.50 dollars for each of his 11.4 million shares, roughly 750 million dollars, on the understanding that he would stop criticizing it. He took the money and left.

GM spun EDS back out as an independent company in 1996. Perot had already started Perot Systems in 1988, and Dell agreed to buy that one in the same month that HP retired the EDS name.

~ the day the name went ~

HP's reasoning was that its own brand would win more work than a legacy services name would. The integration that produced the decision also produced roughly 19,000 job cuts, and clients spent months unsure which company they were actually contracting with. Joe Eazor, running the unit for HP, described the change as combining EDS's services reputation with HP's technology strength, which is how the retirement of a forty-seven-year-old brand gets described from inside the company doing it.

The legal entity outlived the name by eight years. On 3 April 2017 HP Enterprise Services merged with Computer Sciences Corporation to form DXC Technology, so both of the great American outsourcing houses ended up behind the same new three letters on the same day. eds.com resolves to dxc.com now.

~ the building ~

The headquarters campus sat on 54 acres off Legacy Drive in Plano, Texas, about 1.6 million square feet of office. AT&T is putting its own new headquarters there, and at eight in the morning on Sunday 9 August 2026 the executive building was brought down by implosion. Fox 4 in Dallas covered it as a Collin County landmark coming down. People as far out as Frisco heard the charges, having been told in advance not to call 911 about the noise.

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