“As Mr. Palmisano took the stage, a cartoon ran on a big screen
in the background. IBM’s E-business logo, donned in western wear,
gunned down corporate logos from Sun and hardware and software
storage vendor EMC…both of which were unarmed.”
“The point of the spaghetti Western skit is that IBM doesn’t
want to just fade into oblivion as some hulking services company
that sells everyone else’s technology to everyone else’s Internet
businesses. Coming off a disappointing fourth quarter and a
hunker-down mentality from Y2K-related paranoia, IBM’s top
executives are upbeat about Big Blue’s chances for putting its
server products at the heart of Net companies everywhere. They also
reiterated the company’s commitment to run Linux across all of the
company’s computing platforms….”
“In aggressively chasing Sun in the Unix market, IBM also
plans to milk the open source phenomenon. “We’ll have Linux running
across all our server platforms by the end of this year,” Mr.
Palmisano promised the crowd.“