Steve Jobs, in a speech at MIT's Sloan School of Management in 1992, relayed the judgment of Pentagon CIO Paul Strassmann: the lesson of the Gulf War is that the best software will win the war.

Strassmann found, after researching the IT spending of various U.S. companies in his book "The Business Value of Computers," that successful companies and poorly performing companies had similar IT spending as a percentage of revenue, both around 2%; the difference was not in budget proportion but in IT allocation.

Jobs recounted that poorly performing companies allocated most of their IT budgets to "management productivity"—such as documentation, reports, administrative, and office computer tools; whereas more successful companies directed most of their budgets towards "operational productivity," which involves systems that directly run core business operations, transactions, supply, manufacturing, or service delivery.

Jobs acknowledged that during the first ten years at Apple, his focus on personal computers and Macintosh essentially served management productivity and did not directly engage with core business operations. At that time, he had left Apple and was leading NeXT; later, NeXTSTEP became the technological foundation for Mac OS X after Apple acquired NeXT.

The verifiable key points from the original text are "software determines victory or defeat" and "budget allocation determines productivity," but the statements regarding "hardware reshuffles every 18 months, leading by a factor of two can only last for 6 months, and Microsoft took 9 years to catch up with Macintosh" do not appear in the available transcript of the MIT speech and cannot be considered confirmed quotes from this speech.

From a market mechanism perspective, the true buyers of IT in companies are not the CIO's budget sheets but the business departments responsible for revenue, inventory, pricing, risk control, manufacturing, logistics, and customer delivery. If funds flow towards generic office tools, the benefits typically manifest as localized efficiency; if directed towards operating systems embedded in core processes, software can affect unit costs, turnover speed, error rates, and customer switching costs. The beneficiaries are software vendors that master business data, workflow, and system integration capabilities; vendors that rely solely on hardware specifications or generic functionalities are more easily pressured by standardized competition to compress profits.

Source: Public information