Accounting seems to be getting a lot more creative at IBM Corp and Wall Street analysts are still touting a $13bn to $14bn as the company’s annual AS/400 business. More authoritative sources assure us that the number is at best $11bn, and you can only get to the higher figure by including things like gross financing revenues – which are primarily IBM selling AS/400s to IBM to install on lease with the customer. On that basis, you can say the mainframe business is still doing $35bn, services $30bn, personal computers $10bn, financing $10bn, disks, $7bn, RS/6000s, $5bn, chips $3bn, OEM sales, $3bn, sundries $10bn, and low-and-behold, IBM is the $127bn-a-year company John Akers always promised it would be by now.
