Jim Cannavino, the man who championed OS/2 at IBM Corp for longer than was healthy, then spent a year running Perot Systems Corp before leaving because he got bored, has cropped up as chairman and CEO of CyberSafe Corp, a privately-held Issaquah, Washington- based network security company. Cannavino was the person who approached Microsoft Corp back in the mid-1980s to jointly develop the successor to MS-DOS – OS/2. Everyone knows what Microsoft Corp got out of that arrangement, but Cannavino continued championing OS/2 until his resignation from Big Blue in March 1995, after spending two years as the company’s chief strategist and Lou Gerstner’s technical right- hand man (CI No 2,616). Gerstner replaced him with the former president of Boston Chicken Inc. Following John Akers’ resignation from the IBM hot seat in late 1992, Cannavino had been an outside bet for the CEO position and offered to leave when Gerstner was brought on board. After leaving he helped turn Perot Systems around, but stepped down last July because he lost enthusiasm for the day-to-day running of the company, preferring the role of vision guy. (CI No 3,213)
