Boudu, a hobo in a state of despair, jumped into the Seine. A bookseller saw him floating by, dived into the river and not only saved him but brought him home and tried to rehabilitate him. Alas, it was to no avail. Boudu just didn’t take to the bourgeois life. In the end, Boudu jumped back into the river and floated merrily away. That was in 1932, and it was in a movie called Boudu Sauve Des Eaux, written and directed by Jean Renoir. Jean, the son of impressionist painter Pierre Auguste Renoir, was as determined to live life his way as Boudu, which was why he left France in 1941 for the United States, where he eventually became a US citizen and kept making fine films. In 1985, Boudu was remade as Down And Out In Beverly Hills, with an all-star cast. Ronald Dew, a beggar whose office was a wheelchair, was pulled from the Harlem River on April 16 of this year by a New York fireman of French descent, Robert Marcoux. Dew had reportedly been pushed into the water and left to drown. The first reports of the heroic rescue described Dew as a legless man, but that turned out not to be quite true. Dew had legs, which he tucked under himself while begging from a wheelchair. Police familiar with Dew’s act sometimes chased the deceptive panhandler, who, when pursued, was known to jump up from his wheelchair and run away on a pair of legs his marks didn’t know he had. Dew’s wheelchair was never recovered, but the New York Times reported that the hospital that treated him for hypothermia gave him new clothes and replaced his wheelchair. Big Blue, a corporation drowning in a sea of red ink, was saved by Louis V Gerstner, Jr, who pulled it back from the brink of collapse in less than two years. Big Blue was going under for the usual reason: It was spending money much faster than it earned it. But, as the rescue revealed, Big Blue had resources that were hidden beneath a big grey cloud of bureaucracy. The most unexpected of these was the mainframe, which is once again making a fortune for the company. But there are signs that IBM will return to its old ways, and this time they might not produce the results they had before the company’s near death experience. Customers are buying mainframe MIPS like mad, but they could just be going through a last build-up.
By Hesh Wiener
The same customers that are refilling Big Blue’s diminished coffers are investing even more in technologies from which IBM has not yet learned to turn a profit – servers and personal computers. Lou Gerstner, an executive drowning in the leveraged buyout of RJR-Nabisco, was himself saved. He was rescued by Big Blue’s board of directors, who not only gave him a great job at which he could excel, but agreed to pay him what he once hoped to make on RJR stock options. As a result, Gerstner has earned considerably more from the option bailout clause in his employment contract than he has made in pay, bonuses and IBM stock options. His next move, on the off chance he would like some more money and another success, would be to exercise his IBM options and unload the m when Big Blue is a hundred bucks a share or maybe only ninety-nine. He could then jump back into the mainstream of his true calling. He excels not as an ordinary executive but as a corporate fireman. You, an information processing executive at a giant corporation, were nearly drowned in the tidal wave as IBM’s prow sunk beneath the waves. Your strategy was harshly criticised, your capital equipment budget went askew as the values of all your IBM products collapsed, your whole career was called into question as disrespectful propellerheads described, within earshot of corporate suits, alternative technologies as the miracle you didn’t believe in. Gerstner’s rescue of IBM has redeemed you, for the moment. But it didn’t help your capital budget. If anything, most of the IBM products you acquired during the past few years are worthless and if you have a mainframe that still glitters, you can’t sell it because there is nothing yet available to replace it. You’re too young to retire and not inclined t
o do so anyway, you’re too old to enjoy learning about object programming, and the young propellerheads have all the qualities of mercy shown by their hero, Bill Gates. You felt in your guts that the worst thing you could do is become a lab animal in the Great IBM CMOS Experiment, particularly since you got some Ramac disks and found out everyone else is getting better results with EMC Corp equipment. You figure that if you can hold out for another year or two then maybe, you hope, IBM will be able to prop up your workload on a cheap platform that makes you look like the hero you used to be. IBM is trying, but it is swimming against the tide. From the May 1995 edition of Infoperspectives International, published by Technology News Ltd, 110 Gloucester Avenue, London NW1 8JA, phone 0171 483 2681, fax 0171 483 4541. (C) 1995 Technology News Ltd.
