Lou Gerstner reckons the turnaround at IBM Corp is two-thirds done, according to the Wall Street Journal, reviewing his first four years in office, but despite all the pain, the two thirds that are done are the easy part, and it is very difficult to see where the other third is coming from – and why is IBM such a sorry also-ran in the markets of today such as the Internet? The answer is all too depressingly familiar – one executive who recently left told the paper of a meeting aimed at getting division managers to reach a consensus on a plan for selling Internet servers: four hardware division heads pushed their own separate lines, while the software group advocated shunning software from Microsoft Corp. It was like talking to five different companies, the executive recalls, and needless to say, the bickering fatally handicapped the initiative.
