Stardate 20010705.1422 (On Screen): A few years ago, no less than Lou Gerstner (CEO of IBM) announced that the PC era was over and that soon (by about now, in fact) you'd hardly ever see any. This would, of course, also have meant the end of Microsoft as a major factor in the industry. Microsoft's highway is littered with the roadkill of announcements of its obsolescence. The introduction of Java was going to kill it. Then there were "thin clients" (which Gerstner was pushing), and Netscape was going to make operating systems unimportant with a universal browser. These things come and go. I would have expected that IBM would know better than to make such a pronouncement now, at a time when Microsoft has more control and influence than ever before.
It's particularly strange for someone at IBM to claim that "We don't think (the proprietary model) is viable anymore." IBM is one of the largest sellers of proprietary software in the world, and it was the largest such seller until about three years ago. Sales of proprietary software still represent in excess of $12 billion per year of revenue for IBM. If that model is no longer viable, why hasn't that fact appeared in IBM's SEC filings? Wouldn't you think that maybe IBM's stockholders would want to know that 14% of IBM's business was about to go bye-bye?
Well, it's not in the SEC filings because it isn't true. That statement was made by said IBM rep at a Linux gathering in Europe. There's a word for that: "pandering". The IBM rep was sucking up to the crowd. (discuss)
