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I attended the IBM annual meeting in Louisville this morning, and took the opportunity to ask a question about the iSeries. I asked why the iSeries seems to be treated lately like an embarrassing stepchild. It is hardly mentioned at all in the IBM annual reports, isn't mentioned during the meeting, isn't demonstrated in the expo for shareholders, and doesn't receive much marketing exposure. This is particularly sad since for the second year in a row, a big iSeries announcement has been done the same week of the shareholder's meeting. Since this is the best business machine IBM has in their portfolio, I don't understand why IBM isn't bragging about it, rather than keeping it a secret. The iSeries has about the highest customer sat rating possible. I'm on the board of directors for COMMON, IBM's largest user's group, and IBM's lack of attention to this box is greatly disturbing to the 30,000 COMMON members... Sam Palmissano said they certainly aren't trying to ignore the iSeries -- he gave an overview of yesterday's announcement, and said they are continuing to invest in the box. He said I might be confused by IBM's eServer branding strategy, which is successful, as it has gained them 7.5 points of market share -- under that strategy, IBM is just talking about the eServer as a whole, and not focusing on any single box. (Of course, that doesn't explain why they did have a pSeries in the expo, clearly labelled as a pSeries, or why he included both the pSeres and the zSeries in his report, without talking about the eServer as a whole...) Lou Gerstner then jumped in and said he agreed the AS/400 is a great box, said that when he was at Nabisco all of his processing was done on AS/400s, and said "Sam and Janet and I are in agreement that this has always been IBM's best business box, now, and when it was an AS/400, and even before then when, what was it before?" Sam said it was a System/36 and and a System/38. So while they clearly didn't say they would start marketing the iSeries, everyone at the shareholder's meeting heard good things about it... Janet Krueger
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