Re: what was the single mgmt decision made in mid-1990s. period

From: M. Lazarus
When you say "development", does that mean OS or end-user
application development? I haven't seen any indication that IBM
has made a move into the space that is typically handled by BP's.

I mean both OS and end-user application development. If I understand correctly CTC quietly makes forays into just about every end-user application segment. You may not hear about it, but you see billions of dollars added to IBM's global services revenue.

You may hear about the big acquisitions, like IBM buying a BI vendor, or a document management vendor, or moving into the HA market. But IBM is also present in financial, manufacturing, education, and just about every application segment you can think of.

IBM has steadily been moving away from low-margin markets. They sold their PC business to Lenovo. They know that servers are moving toward commodity status. Yes, they're still in the server business, and they have an interest in making traditional IBM i customers happy, but the competition is getting stiff enough and margins are getting low enough, and sales are declining enough, that IBM is carving out a chunk of the application market.

Now that Congress has passed a bill funding a national system for medical records, it would be interesting to see which parts of that IBM goes after. My gut feel is that they want more than data center hosting on IBM equipment. I bet they want a substantial piece of the applications, along with Websphere related stuff.