IBM's 3Q statement from their website actually doesn't look too bad for those of us that are non-IBM investors. Some comments:
Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., IBM chairman and chief executive officer, said: "It was a decidedly mixed quarter. On
the negative side, we saw a Y2K slowdown toward the end of the quarter, particularly in our large servers,
This is undoubtedly mostly mainframes, which everyone felt would be most susceptible to any Y2K slowdown. Microsoft didn't cite any Y2K effects, so I'd bet it's a blue (pun intended) phenomenon.
"Looking forward, we believe we will continue to feel the effects of the Y2K slowdown in the fourth quarter
and into early next year," Mr. Gerstner said. "However, even though it is difficult to make predictions, next
year has the potential to be a very good year for IBM, once we get past any lingering Y2K effects.
Well, at least they're not using Y2K effects into 2000 as a pre-warn excuse for all of 2000. Very good year sounds pretty good.
Personal computer revenues increased, with
particularly strong growth in the Netfinity server line. Microelectronics revenues also increased, while
RS/6000 revenues declined slightly. The Y2K issue adversely affected AS/400 revenues to a significant
degree and System/390 revenues -- which faced a difficult year-over-year comparison -- also fell due to the
Y2K slowdown and ongoing price reductions. Storage revenues were flat and networking hardware
revenues declined significantly from the same period of last year.
There it is...Netfinity is a Xeon based Windows NT server. It got IBM's top marks. ALL of the other server types, i.e., AS/400, RS/6000 and S390 were down. Wintel is the ONLY bright spot, WRT servers/computers.
The whole statement:
ibm.com
Tony |
