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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC)
INTC 39.37+6.7%Jan 2 3:59 PM EST
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To: Tony Viola who wrote (78687)4/13/1999 12:06:00 PM
From: Burt Masnick   of 186894
 
Re:"Jack Akers, IBM was considered an excellent CEO until a lot of FUD
landed on the mainframe scene around that time."

I am fairly sure that I read that Jack Akers was quite proud that he did not have a PC in his office and "wouldn't know what to do with one if he did". He was the poster boy for cluelessness. He was adrift in a a changing world that his own company had brought to the world (along with Apple). He might have been a good choice for a world of moderate stability, but in an era of rapid change, he was without a scintilla of an idea about the PC. Leaving aside his handling of the large business mainframe business he inherited, his malhandling of the opportunity in PCs was mammoth and will be the stuff of MBA courses for a couple of decades.

This is not a business climate that rewards dinosaurs or head bangers. I don't know which 5fer is, but I have heard that his nickname inside Compaq is "Das Boot" so I suspect head banging tendencies. My own experience has shown that really effective head bangers are nearly always blindsided by reality because they have terrorized their subordinates into not telling them any bad news (they do literally shoot the messenger). Hence, ultimately they only get REALLY bad news.
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