Re-birth of IBM article in The Economist

[mcrump@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

There is a fairly extensive article regarding the re-birth of IBM in the
current edition of The Economist.  It makes for some interesting reading
and also has a 'nice' quote regarding the AS/400....

Thanks to similar upgrades and the relentless demand for big machines to
drive the
Internet and other new power-hungry technologies like data mining, IBM?s
other
servers also look fairly healthy. Despite pressure from cheap Windows-NT
servers,
the AS/400 'war horse', the most ubiquitous mid-range system in the world,
is
enjoying sales growth at a double-digit rate.

Unfortunately there is an oblique reference to the AS/400 as being a
mainframe and proprietary........can't win them all.

Every turnaround has its sceptics. Mr Gerstner?s critics focus on the fact
that,
although IBM?s distributed-software business (ie, products such as Lotus
Notes that
run on a variety of platforms) has been growing fast (about 11% last year),
 around
70% of its total software sales are proprietary products, mainly for its
S/390 and
AS/400 host computers. This is evidence, argue the critics, that mainframes
 are still
the locomotive for most of the revenues; and mainframes are a declining
business.
There is some truth in this, but it paints an excessively bleak picture.

You can find the entire article at
http://www.economist.com/editorial/freeforall/current/wb9431.html.

Thanks to John Carr for highlighting www.news.com......

Michael Crump
Technical Project Leader
Ball-Foster Glass Container Corp.




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