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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DellFan who wrote (114111)	4/3/1999 8:51:00 PM
From: jbn3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

IBM: What does Gerstner mean by "network"? Here's some more of that item: ibm.com • The PC era is over. This is not to say that PCs are going to die off, any more than mainframes vanished when the IBM PC debuted in 1981. Indeed, IBM's own PC business was an important turnaround story in 1998. But the PC's reign as the driver of customer buying decisions and the primary platform for application development is over. In all those respects, it has been supplanted by the network. You experience this every time you go online to buy a book or trade stock. Where is the transaction executed? Where is the data managed and stored? Where does the processing take place? A teeny part is handled by your PC. Most of the work is done behind the scenes, in the network, by bigger computer systems. Businesses deploying network applications have to handle an exponential increase in the volume of interactions and transactions, and they need to do something useful with the tidal wave of information generated from those interactions. Both needs are driving the rediscovery of enterprise computing – that is, industrial-strength servers and the software that runs on them. As the Net takes over much of the work previously performed by PCs, we're seeing another interesting development: a proliferation of new personal computing devices – personal digital assistants, Web-enabled TVs, screenphones, smart cards and a host of products we have yet to imagine. One market research firm predicts that sales of non-PC Internet devices will surpass PCs within five years. This explosion of “information appliances” will bring computing to millions of new users – perhaps a billion people – faster and more affordably than the PC could ever have taken us. All of this is very good news for IBM – the company that, in many ways, invented enterprise computing. In recent years we've invested heavily to reinvent our server and enterprise software lines...