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Technology Stocks : IBM -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J R KARY who wrote (3034)	5/4/1998 6:21:00 PM
From: Arrow Hd.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8218

I think that IBM got into the satellite business a bit prematurely and their history of acquisitions was poor. Prior to Gerstner IBM made a number of bad deals. Prodigy also was not very competitive and jointly owned deals often carry their own baggage. Further, the strategy was towards IBM Global Services and internet access. I had prodigy at home and only used it to get into the net. The data bases and applications Prodigy had that I was interested in could be duplicated elsewhere so it was not a selling point. Now the IBM Global Services operation is one of the world's largest internet service providers with more than 1000 local internet access points in 52 countries plus the IBM Global Network services 30,000 customers in 850 cities in over 100 countries. So Prodigy was expendable. IBM Global Services is part of the overall total solution that can be sold to the customer from IBM and is one of the reasons that 70% of all the corporate data in the world is managed by IBM software and the IBM transaction processing software alone handles some 20 billion mission-critical business transactions a day for most of the Fortune 200 companies. And Lotus has been very successful with over 20 million Lotus seats installed up from only 2.2 million in 1995 when IBM acquired Lotus. Tivoli's systems management products are growing twice as fast as those of the industry. When combined with strategic acquisitions of pieces of other key technology companies in weaves a web that is very compelling but impossible to figure out from an investment perspective. It is the most complex corporation in the most complex industry in the world.