Such a lovely early example of what would come to be known as "The Innovator's Dilemma". It's an almost unavoidable pattern that would repeat many times in the tech industry - and still does to this day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

It's interesting Watson was worried CDC achieved this in spite of only having 17 people on the team, not realizing it was because they only had 17 people on the team. Of course, it helped that one of those people was Seymour Cray.