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The problem is that the current board is living off the carcass of strategic decisions past: decisions to compete in every business sector in which IBM is active, from mainframes to services, were taken long before Mr. Gerstner took charge. Since then the board has remained firmly rooted and has failed to move strategically to compete as new IT marketplaces have emerged, especially in client/server.
Still, its not all bad news. Whereas dismay might describe the emotions of stockholders, customers and many IBM employees, the business schools must be in their seventh heaven! Never in their wildest dreams could they have imagined such a quality stream of case study material emerging from a company like IBM - indeed, it would not be surprising if one of them were to offer Mr. Gerstner an honorary degree.
I have this vision of Snow White standing in the doorway of her cottage, waving good-bye in the morning to the Seven Dwarves carrying their picks and shovels: leaving in the other direction ...this little piggy went to market... At the end of the day, seven weary dwarves return from their toils whilst from the other direction comes the farmer carrying a bag of gold. As the days go by, more and more weary dwarves come home each evening and the farmer's bag of gold gets smaller and smaller.
Part of the answer has to be to put the PC folk, the OS/2 folk, the DOS folk and the Lotus folk together, with a mission to acquire for IBM a respectable share of the client server marketplace, with its potential to yield higher (software driven) margins: a comparison of Microsoft's and IBM's gross revenues clearly demonstrates the upside potential. As Sun lock down the web server market, Cisco corner web connectivity, Microsoft dominate client/server and EMC continue to bite into mainframe DASD, unless IBM starts to fight back, it will be left to operate a lower growth and lower margin business.
Whatever happens, with hindsight one thing is certain: the last time this pattern emerged, the then board waited far loo long before taking action.
Warp Speed Ahead!
My own wish is that IBM/OS2 they would develop the browser to end all browsers. Let them spend billions for that NT 4 crap, or 95, 98 2nd, 3rd, 4th, dogmeat and slime 2000, whatever, it's still gonna be a new edition of the same stinking chamberpot. Poor billionaire Bill broke and cried under the anti-trust pressure, he was subject too. I'd like to see him have a heart attack over the lawsuits for the negligence he has wrought to the world with his rank rate Operating System. But we can't be too hard on our innovator (or is it copier and usurper?). Hell, he's won the game that came to pass with his shallow greed driven generation. He has won. Yes sir. God save the emperor, his clothes and his new digits.
Indelible Blue, I assume, has Warp 3 updates on their, "WarpUp" disk.
For Freeware/Shareware, please see my August Editorial at: http://www.os2ss.com/connect/edit0800.htm
Hope this helps. - Tim Bryce
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