RE: 5 straight quarters of negative sales growth

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Liotta [mailto:qsrvbas@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, January 19, 2007 4:04 PM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: 5 straight quarters of negative sales growth


Richter,Steve wrote:

more bad news on the system i sales front. For the 5th quarter in a row, 
sales dropped.

4q05 -18
1q06 -22
2q06 -7
3q06 -22
4q06 -10
http://www.ibm.com/investor/4q06/4q06earnings.phtml

It'd be useful with a little more detail.

For example, "For the WebSphere family of software products, which 
facilitate customers' ability to manage a wide variety of business 
processes using open standards to interconnect applications, data 
and operating systems, revenues increased 22 percent." Hmmm... how 
much of what we spend on 'WebSphere XXXXX for iSeries' is diverted 
into there?

I think the 22% increase in WebSphere sales proves how profitable user based 
pricing can be. IBM is selling a lot more p and x systems than i. DB2 is sold 
per user and per core on those two systems, so I am guessing so is WS. However 
it is sold, by selling the p and x hardware and OS at low prices, IBM has a lot 
of customers to whom they can sell their al a carte software. End result - 
large growth in sales of software and services.

-Steve