“IBM’s president and chief operating officer–and heir apparent
to CEO Lou Gerstner–hopes to make 2001 the year of Big Blue. But
he must tackle a few logistical problems first, sorting out supply
issues that kept IBM from meeting demand for notebooks, servers and
mainframes during the second half of 2000….”
“He is also one of IBM’s biggest Linux advocates, placing the
alternative flavor of the Unix operating system near the center of
a broad plan to catch the second wave of technological revolution.
The Internet, being the first wave, is giving way to Linux, and
both share similar characteristics, he said….”
“You are very bullish on Linux. How important is the Unix
variant for IBM as you look ahead to 2001?”
“The original thinking has been more confirmed when you think
about where we were coming from. We always felt when we saw the
adoption rate of Linux and the number of students coming out of
schools trained with skills, this reminded us of the Internet four
or five years ago.”
“We could see there was going to be an environment much like the
Internet, where from an application perspective these–what I call
open standards, to keep it simple–were going to evolve so people
could write applications in a very open way. Much like they were
doing with the Internet that could move quite quickly into the
corporate space.”