Mary,
Re: You are absolutely corrected about that - but not for the reasons you think.
Getting a little bit know it all here?
Lou Gerstner has done a remarkable job raising IBM valuation through shrewd buyback of shares with
borrowed money to make earnings look good. In the same way he has made a legacy mainframe and legacy
operating system (legacy - meaning obsolete, bloated, and high cost to maintain), and through remarkable
marketing, make CIO's think they have no other choice for large server applications.
Nothing of the sort. Many longtime mainframe customers tried alternatives, like networks of PCs and servers, with disastrous results, and came crawling back. Hate to sound like a broken record, but RAS was the killer. Of course, IA64 will make great strides beyond IA32, and Windows 2000 should help. Speaking of bloated OSs, that's the term for Microsoft's OSs. S390 is small in comparison, for what it does, believe it or not. And just ask Scumbria how reliable Microsoft OSs are.
It's only the magic of Lou Gerstner that has kept this fiction going. Once he leaves, I believe this house of
cards will collapse.>
So, he can't be around a whole lot longer, and IBM stock has gone ballistic. Is it an obvious short when he leaves?
Tony |
