Metcalfe was terrified of Token Ring for a long time, because of the power of IBM. He said that people had been telling him every day for 10 years that Token Ring would kill Ethernet and that Ethernet had no future.
“What IBM underestimated in their dominance was the power of an open standard,” Metcalfe said. “In that old IBM, in its dark little heart, it was not committed to open standards, and its products were not interoperable.”