In a stream of mea culpas, IBM Corp’s chief strategist James Cannavino told a Securities Industry Association conference in New York, where many of the attendees were IBM customers, that IBM has made poor business decisions in the past – we dropped the ball on Unix, on database, and we failed to capitalise on the client-server distributed computing solutions; and while I can really assure you that we can lose those bad habits, it is really important to note one thing- despite our past difficulties, the vast majorty of you have maintained some loyalty to IBM and we value that partnership; he called the chip alliance between Hewlett-Packard Co and Intel Corp a challenging force in the computer industry, and suggested that it was a tremendously powerful endorsement of the Power architecture – I think they are searching for a way to match that pace; they are both very good companies, and so I view it as a substantial challenge in the industry, but we are going to go straight forward; he also said he expected PowerPC to play a big role in interactive television, particularly set-top boxes, as well as a broad range of other industries such as automotive and machine tools – if it doesn’t crack it in cars, something will be very wrong, because Ford Motor Co is committed to using the chip as the control centre in all its future vehicles.
