A sometime IBM chairman made Bill's point negatively, in a once celebrated phrase. that phrase was
IBM is not an eleemosynary organization. Profit seeking is not, however, a constructive objective. A company must decide how to make profits and, crucially, over what time horizon to try to maximize them. It can take these decisions well or badly, succeed or fail. The masters of American industry in the 1970s and 1980s outsourced and thus destroyed much of the largest and most successful industrial economy in the history of the world in pursuit of very short-term profits. IBM did not decamp in this way. It did make other mistakes. It nevertheless survived, and it is now a more diverse and even more highly profitable company than it was at the time of its hegemony in the computer industry. (That hegemony bred chutzpah/hubris, and we and IBM are well quits of it.) There is anecdotal evidence that IBM's mainframe business remains highly profitable. What has happened and is still perhaps insufficiently understood is that 1) smaller mainframe shops are disappearing and 2) larger ones are growing ever more rapidly. This change has been and will continue to be painful for some. There are no easy ways to help these people available, but perhaps more can be done by taking thought. It may even be that we need a new eleemosynary organization to address their plight. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
