Page "IBM Future Systems project" Paragraph 2

Other manufacturers had started to market compatible hardware, mainly peripherals such as tape and disk drives, at a price significantly lower than IBM, thus shrinking the possible base for recovering the cost of software and services.

Early in 1971, after Gene Amdahl had left IBM to set up his own company offering IBM compatible mainframes, an internal IBM taskforce ( project Counterpoint ) concluded that the compatible mainframe business was indeed a viable business, and that the basis for charging for software and services as part of the hardware price would quickly vanish.