Office Depot, which claims to be the world’s biggest office products supplier, turned in annual sales of $6.1bn, up 14%, but with net profits down, from $133m to $129m, a decline the company puts down mainly to an increasingly sluggish computer market. The company also, bizarrely enough, is quite proud of the fact that it bucked the client/server trend by converting virtually all retail hardware and software to mainframe systems, a move that, in words that will warm the cockles of Big Iron jockeys everywhere, has resulted in significant improvements in reliability and stability of the MIS environment. If only they sold mainframes..?
